A visit to the zoo can be fun. You are able to pay $10 (except in San Diego it’s $40) and see brown warthogs, green lizards, yellow snakes, pink flamingos, striped sharks, spotted giraffes, fuzzy lemurs, small turtles, big bears, and beautiful Mandarin ducks. This picture happened to be one of my Top Ten favorite of photos I took and I posted one like it on Facebook. I really should start posting pictures to Flickr but that will be another habit for another day.

I appreciate zoos helping species, that have been killed off incessantly or that can’t be supported in their place of origin, to repopulate. I prefer to spend more time and money  searching for the animals in their natural habitat and then hopefully sneaking in at least one good photo before they notice me and leave or, in the case of alligators and other predatory animals, before they invite me to be lunch. This special day was almost upsetting in the start. We arrive second in the parking lot and third in line (I was taking pictures).

We purchase tickets to feed the sting rays and head to the first exhibit, an aviary. I begin to take pictures of herons and ducks and I get to one perched on a rock. I look at my display screen to see if I need to change the exposure and it looked like a wide-screen video, black on top and bottom. There was a metal edge around one of the mirrors in the lens. I was nervous, but I shoved it back into place. It didn’t move the rest of the day and I was able to get plenty of good photos.