Shooting Zoo Wildlife

The other day I visited Ueno Zoo in Tokyo. I usually find zoos rather depressing, seeing large animals caged up with so little open space. However zoos do provide children with an experience to see rare animals more easily. And they also provide photographers the opportunity to hone their skills before trying to capture wild ones.

Even though these animals are captive, they still offer some good photographic opportunities. Natural looking, environmental portraits are almost impossible but close up portraits are a easier, since the animals are a little closer. The real challenge in a zoo environment is removing those ubiquitous bars. When taking photographs we have to deal with the bars between the camera and the animal and the bars in the background. So let's take a look and see what we can do about them.

With the right selection of equipment, those bars in front are seldom a problem. All you need is a relatively long lens with a relatively fast aperture. Here I used a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens with a 2.0x Teleconverter. The foreground bars have disappeared completely since the bars are so far from the plane of focus that, the blur they create is larger than the size of the sensor. They are essentially acting like a neutral density filter.

Squirrels at Morioka Zoo in Iwate, Japan.

Canon EOS Kiss X digital with an EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM + 2.0x TC at 640mm EFL. Exposure Trio: 1/800s, f/5.6 & ISO 400.

Unfortunately, the squirrel was very close to those background bars so they were only slightly out of focus, but still very much recognisable and thus quite objectionable. To try to remove them we could get a little more distance between the subject and background bars and use a larger aperture.

For this shot of a Japanese Red-Crowned Crane, I removed the 2.0x TC to get a larger aperture. The front bars are gone again and the background bars are far less noticeable. But they're still there. Perhaps a 200mm f/2.0 lens, but they are well beyond my budget. And in any case I'd rather spend that money on a real safari, where I didn't have to worry about bars.

Japanese Red Crowned Crane at Utsunomiya, Japan

Canon EOS 7D with a 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM at 320mm EFL. Exposure Trio: 1/400s, f/3.2 & ISO 400.

An option to remove those annoying bars is to photograph from an angle where the background bars are not in the shot, as with this cougar.

Cougar at Morioka Zoo in Iwate, Japan.

Canon EOS Kiss X digital with a EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM + 2.0x TC at 640mm EFL. Exposure Trio: 1/160s, f/5.6 & ISO 400.

Another option is to get in really tight with the animal so there isn't any background to worry about, like with this shot of a Condor.

Condor at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo – Japan

Canon EOS 7D with a EF 400mm f/5.6 L USM at 640mm EFL. Exposure Trio: 1/640s, f/5.6 & ISO 3200.

With the right distance between the foreground bars and background bars their, caged environment will disappear, with a shallow enough depth of field. Long, fast lenses help with this goal. A 200mm f/2.8 is probably a good starting point but 300 or 400mm
would be better.

A side effect to this technique is that most photos will require a little extra saturation and contrast to look more natural.