Rodney Campbell's Blog

I took my girls to Taronga Zoo here in Sydney last Sunday (yes the day with torrential rain and extremely dark overcast conditions!).

Unfortunately we didn’t have a great deal of choice in the timing – my girls “really!” wanted to go to the zoo and we’ve a visitor staying with us and they’re leaving soon. The girls all had a good time and one upside of the inclement weather was that there were relatively few people at the zoo (for a weekend) so it definitely wasn’t crowded.

We were reasonably lucky in that it didn’t rain heavily for much of the time we were there however the conditions were extremely overcast and it was quite dark as a result. The overcast skies is good (for photography), the dark and rain not so much 🙂

It was however a great time to try out the higher ISO capabilities of the D7000 since I wanted a reasonably fast shutter speed to capture the animals and I was sporting a slower long lens (my 70-300mm f4.5-5.6). I also took my 17-50/2.8 but it was a bit too rainy and windy for me to bother switching lenses back and forth so I stuck with the longer lens for the whole day.

I shot mainly in Manual (sometimes in Aperture Priority) and selected my desired Aperture and Shutter Speed and used ISO to provide good exposures.

What follows is some of the better (compositionally) higher ISO images – some of the shots (not posted here) were even taken out to ISO 3600 and even those look reasonably clean and usable 🙂

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay gallery viewer.

Lizard in Blue

NIKON D7000 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 145 mm, 1/160 sec at f / 4.8, ISO 1250

Snow Leopard (no not Mac OS X 10.6…)

Snowy Leap

NIKON D7000 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 165 mm, 1/250 sec at f / 5.0, ISO 560

Looking at You

NIKON D7000 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 270 mm, 1/250 sec at f / 5.6, ISO 1000

and a portrait of my youngest just after having a very nice face painting job done…

Tigress

NIKON D7000 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 122 mm, 1/200 sec at f / 4.8, ISO 1600

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