This weekend just past Emily and I decided to visit the Perth Zoo for something different to do. The Perth Zoo was somewhere we’d both wanted to visit for some time. It was fairly overcast this weekend, which I thought would be the perfect conditions for photographing animals as the light from the sun would be diffused and I would be able to avoid any harsh shadows and blown highlights in my photos.

We started off wandering around through the Australia Walkabout and then through the Asian, and African sections before leaving. We were both pretty excited when we noticed the little chipmunk running free through the zoo grounds, about halfway into our visit, as we’d both never seen one before – at least not roaming free. The photo of the Cheetah was one of the last photos I took before we decided to call it a day. He was perched atop the tree stump perfectly, almost posing for a photo without any of the fences in the composition.

It had been quite some time since I had taken photographs of wildlife as I haven’t had a zoom lens since I sold my Canon 350D and kit 300mm lens a couple of years back. Now that I’ve got the Canon 70-200mm L series zoom lens, I think I’ll be making “animal portraiture” a more common part of my photographic portfolio as I quite enjoyed myself.

I’ve still got a whole bunch more photos to process yet, but these two photos caught my eye while quickly flicking through all of my photographs from the day so they turned up first on the list of photos to be post-processed.

I’ve always wanted to try a shot like this; a really simple photo of tree trunks with lots of small detail and nice colours. I’d never really found a nice place to shoot what I had in mind, until the other day.

It’s a 6 photo stitch on a heavily overcast day. It was raining lightly while I was setting up and shooting so I had to be fairly quick to not get any water drops on the lens.

I had been waiting for a nice overcast morning to shoot some of the farmland just out past Canungra for a while now, and this particular morning presented the perfect opportunity. There had been a lot of rain the few days preceding this one, so there was a LOT of water around, and some low cloud hovering in and around the mountains.

This is a 7 photo stitch and there is a lot of detail in the high resolution copy of this photograph. You can even see a bunch of Kookaburras sitting in the lone tree on the lower right of the scene when viewed at full size.

Canungra, Queensland, Australia.