Photos and the Reasons Why

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Taken on October 24, 2009
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1600)
Aperture: f/2.8
Focal Length: 70 mm
ISO Speed: 400

This somewhat dreamlike shot was taken at the Khao Kheow (Green Mountain) Open Zoo. They feed the tigers meet on the inside of the pool you can see here, a pool which has a large glass wall so you can see inside. It’s great to watch, but the glass is always dirty, which usually makes photography difficult. It does, however, make for a nice soft focus effect when the tigers are some distance away and the krud on the glass is out of focus. In that instance, it acts like a soft focus filter and gives a nice dreamy look.

I like how calm and relaxed he looks, especially with the beautiful markings on his face. The damaged ear gives him a slightly war torn look. It’s nothing spectacular, just a good solid photo.

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Taken on November 21, 2009
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 800

Location and musings:
This shot was taken at the Tiger Zoo in Sri Racha, the same place I took the tiger-through-the-hoop shot from last weekend. People putting their head in the crocodile mouth is a pretty famous circus trick, and suppose I’m not surprised they do it here. Before she puts her head in there, she spends a while banging a stick around inside the animal’s mouth. One theory is that she does that to remind the animal of the beating it will get if it closes it’s mouth. My theory is that it provides some sort of instinctual incentive to keep it’s mouth open. I’m unsure of how well a crocodile can be trained.

Also, she puts her head right up in the corner of the croc’s mouth, I’m sure part of the reason there is to keep the animal from getting much in the way of acceleration on the mouth.

Technical thoughts:
This photo was taken at the extreme limits of my old D40. At 200 mm, I was at the longest end of my longest lens. The photo has been further cropped, so that, with the additional APS-C crop factor, means this was probably effective 4-500 mm. I fired the flash, and it did have an effect, although not enough for the camera to register a return. The aperture is wide open. 1/125th of a second is the absolute minimum speed I could possibly imagine holding this shot steady. 800 ISO isn’t the highest setting the D40 has, but with the amount of noise that registers in the shot, I don’t think I could have feasibly bumped it up any more.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 1/5000 sec
Aperture: f/4.8
Focal Length: 60 mm
ISO Speed: 500

It’s tough to make a bird look majestic when it has clipped wings. It can’t be proud and powerful when it’s so obviously missing something, and in such an unnatural fashion. Indeed, a photo of a kite that had lost some feathers in a fight would be quite interesting.

I’m just happy that it’s a sharp, well exposed photo. The framing isn’t too terrible either. That pre-sunset sky is pretty great with just the slightest hint of pink in the sky. Alas, there isn’t much detail in the kite, and the clipped wings scream “this is unnatural and wrong.”

It was taken while some employees were firing bits of meat into the air with a slingshot which the kits swooped after. It was tough to catch them with a background other than the trees, and when they were showing a nice profile. This is probably about as difficult as a shot can get while at the zoo, so having the basics right makes me happy.

With this, I am pretty close to running out of all interesting Singapore photos. I have taken my camera on a couple of experimental photo-trips, but I’ve yet to achieve anything I really liked. I’ll get something new, eventually. At the worst, I’ll be traveling for a whole week in mid-april, where I’m certain to get better photos. I may end up diving more into my archive until then.

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Taken on August 11, 2009
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.02 sec (1/50)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 800
This photo was taken at the Sri Racha Open Zoo. Sri Racha is a city located about 30 minutes north of me and means “Grand King” or “Grand Royalty” in Thai. There is no “Sr” sound in Thai so it is often written as “Si Racha” even though the thai spelling, สรี, has all of the letters s, r, and i. There is a popular condiment in the U.S. called Sri Racha. It is spicy and shares a name with the city, but has no other connection to Thailand.

There is a cage in one of the back corners of the Zoo that had rather lax security. I probably shouldn’t have spent much time there, for my own safety. There was a metal gate, some electric fencing, and the tigers. They were probably two to three feet away from me. One of them roared, a truly intense sound that set me back on my heels.

The location allowed for some great close up shots though. Tigers are such huge, powerful animals that any little section of them ends up being a great photo. This series has a lot of closeup shots, lots of eyes, lots of glares and stares. I love this shot because I think it’s about as powerful as a photograph of a mammal can get without showing eyes.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Taking pictures of birds at these shows is always difficult because they have clipped wings and leashes to keep them from flying away. This bird appears to have some stray feathers that I doubt you’d see on a healthy wild hawk. I don’t know what it means in the birds, but it probably isn’t healthy.

I think it works for this photo since the strain the bird appears to be under is explained by the out of character elements. This photo reminds me a lot of the tiger about to jump through a hoop photo that I’ll post on Sunday. I imagine I’m going to post some images over the next few days as I explore my thoughts on animal abuse in zoos and whether or not animals are here for our entertainment.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture: f/5.3
Focal Length: 105 mm
ISO Speed: 500

This photo invokes some pretty severe unhappy feelings in me. It was towards the end of the day in Singapore. I had been walking and sweating all day, and I was tired and hungry. I was feeling rather lonely and short tempered.

When I took this shot, I was really happy how it turned out, especially with the kids in the background. I figured I would offer the photo to the parents them with no strings attached, just so the photo would have some purpose. More importantly, I would have some purpose.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the parents treated me like a hustler and refused to even speak to me, dismissing me with a wave. I’m unsure how I would have reacted, you definitely build up a lot of mistrust of people offering you things here. I don’t exactly fit the profile of the normal huckster, and I guess I figured my honesty would shine through. Alas, I was left rejected with my photo.

I felt like not just my offer was rejected, but my purpose. I could have felt great for doing a kind thing, instead I felt terrible for being unwanted.

Still, it’s a fun photo with a lot of vectors going in every which way, all of them interesting to follow. They say of action and sports photography that you want to show the player, the ball, and the goal. In this case the ball is the meat, the player is the guy holding the meat, and the bird is the goal. You can tell he is trying to keep the meat from the bird and that his expression, along with that of the audience, tells you that the bird missed it.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

This photo was taken, once again, in the Singapore bird park. A group of lovebirds were building a nest inside a birdhouse up on a tree. I stood and watched them for a while, taking an occasional picture. The bird park has a sign referring to them as black masked love birds, but they are also referred to as yellow collared or just masked lovebirds.

Lovebirds are an interesting subject with their eyes. They have the white feathers around the eyes giving them the appearance of having enormous whites, when the eyes themselves are entirely black. It produces a slight Uncanny Valley response. That is, the birds appear to have eyes very close to what you would expect, but it’s not quite right, so you have a natural revulsion of a sort.

In any case, it’s a fun if slightly blurry shot of four birds looking quite chummy while they build a nest together. The one bird with the straw in it’s beak is essential for the setup to work.

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Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1000)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 400

This is, by far, my most popular photo, but I don’t like it. It’s blurry, it’s static, it’s not well framed, it’s poor in every technical aspect. As of this writing, it has 1,688 views, has been commented on by 11 people, and has been made a favorite 7 times. It is the first google image search result for “climbing white tiger ” which generates a hit or three a day. It was also used to make an iPhone desktop screen which appears to also be popular because that adds another couple of hits a day.

My next most popular photo has 138 views.

I think it’s so popular because you can see the tiger’s face. The way he is hugging the pole and the look on his face is vulnerable. He is sympathetic. I have a bunch of similar shots of this tiger, none of which have managed to garner more than a couple dozen hits. It’s easy to get so many because he climbs that pole three times a day every day at the Khao Kheow open zoo about an hour north of me. There is always a piece of meat strung up there at the top and I’ve shot pictures of him climbing up the pole, jumping down, grabbing the meat, eating the meat, or just about anything else you could ask for.

But this shot is the one that people like.

In any case, White Tigers themselves are interesting creatures. They are not endangered because they are not a species. They are a simple genetic mutation of Bengal Tigers, and Bengal Tigers are the only creatures which have ever been found to have this mutation. They are not albinos because they have the black stripes, while albinos would have to be entirely white.

The gene is recessive and there aren’t many tigers known to have it, so the only reliable way to get more white tigers is through excessive inbreeding. The situation is even more complicated because the gene that causes whiteness also causes the tigers to be crosseyed and suffer from mental retardation.

Still, they bring in visitors to zoos, so they are valuable and will continue to be bred. I’m still struggling with whether or not I’m ok with the concept that animals can be here for our entertainment. I’m a long shot from having a settled viewpoint on supporting questionable breeding habits.

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Taken on January 29, 2010 at 10.11am ICT
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 200

To continue the discussion from the past couple of photos, here is another zoo photo. This one was taken a little over a month ago at the Khao Kheow zoo in Thailand. This monkey is not one of the zoo exhibits, but he and his family run about eating the food visitors through to the animals, or, in this case, the Bamboo leaves.

Ostensibly, this should be a better photo than it is. People who look at it usually get a brief chuckle from his expression, and the colors are very nice. Everything is green and yellow to brown. The monkey is perfectly sharp and in focus and the background is nicely blurred. He has depth and is well framed.

Most importantly, we know the story here. This monkey is teasing us, and probably wants to be eating those leaves. It’s not the most interesting possible story, but it’s clean and unusual.

It has a couple of problems though. First, as I mentioned yesterday, the whites of his eyes are a dark brown. It’s naturally difficult for us to identify with him. The large brow ridge which shades his eyes does not help. If this were a studio photo or I had an assistant, I would have put a low angle bounce board below and to the left to reflect the sun back up. It would have filled out many of the harsher shadows and produced a much more even photo.

Next, and something I realistically could have corrected, the bamboo branch in the background is too high. If I had been able to get the branch out of the shot, we would be better able to look into those eyes, dark as they are.

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Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

This photo is not nearly as intriguing as yesterday’s photo, and I’m posting it next to explain some of the reasons why I liked the staring starling.

This photo has a few advantages. First, It’s more dynamic. The motion from the birds wings blur a bit and provide a bit of forgiveness for the general softness of the photo. The branch the bird is standing on is a nice solid line along the bottom of the photo, a line that is nicely echoed by his beak.

His eye isn’t looking at us, but it’s still white with a black pupil, so we can follow it and identify with it. Evolutionary biology teaches us that one of the essential factors in human biology are the whites of our eyes. In fact, we are better able to identify with other humans because we can identify what we are looking at. This New York Times article explains it a bit better.

“An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.

Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.”

I’ll post a photo of a monkey tomorrow to explain why I think it’s a challenge for a photo of a primate to be as effective as a photo of an animal with white whites.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I don’t think this is a very good photo. First, its blurry. It’s a 1/160th of a second exposure, so the blurryness is not from camera vibration, but rather because it’s out of focus. I had autofocus on, so I just didn’t give the camera quite enough time to find it’s focus. Either that or it was too dark.

The real problem with the photo, though, is that branch in the background. The unfocused part of the photo, referred to as the bokeh, is often as important as the in focus section. Some skilled photographers make the bokeh itself the subject, usually when there are interesting lights, reflections, or distortions. In this case the bokeh is distracting. The line it traces right past the birds beak pulls you away from the eyes and runs you right out of the photo. You can’t look at the bird without wanting to look above or below the photo so the whole point is lost.