Sunday, June 22, 2008

Hollywild Animal Park

Peacock Strut

I apologize for the lack of posts recently. I had been busy getting ready for my parents to visit. They were bringing my son back and staying the weekend. So, I had to clean the house and get ready for them.

On Saturday, we went out to Hollywild Animal Park. Hollywild is a local exotic animal park that trains animals for Hollywood. Several of their animals have appeared in movies, television shows, commercials, advertising and promotional campaigns. They also have a small zoo set up to earn money in order to pay expenses for the animal's upkeep. The park also has a very popular Christmas lights display during the holiday season. In the zoo there are various exhibits, gift shop, picnic shelters, and a "safari" ride through their "Outback" which is home to European deer, Sitka deer, emus, bison, watusi, and other cattle. More after the jump.



My son really enjoyed feeding the baby goats and some deer. We got some nice photographs and had a good time. The weather was hot, but there was a nice overcast that softened the sunlight. I shot all of the photographs with my 18-135mm lens. I chose this one because I knew I would need the flexibility to capture wide and zoomed shots. It worked well and I'm happy with what I was able to capture.

The full gallery is here.

Emus:

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

Peacocks

The Bold

The Beautiful

The Cocky

The End

Hoof Animals:

Alphonso

Solitary

Lakota

The "Outback"

Thanks for reading. Have fun and keep shooting.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This really makes me want to get to a zoo. I really like the bad emu shot.

Craig Lee said...

Thanks, Chris. I got a lot of emu headshots. They are so tall that was the only thing you could see out of the bus window at times. We did get warned about hand feeding them though. They aren't the brightest bird and might get a finger if you held it instead of putting the bread in the palm of your hand.

John Brainard said...

Same here.... We planned on going to the LA zoo while we were in California, but my wife got sick. She had a bad cough from some sort of respiratory infection. We went to the doctor's instead.

I love this shot from your gallery. I saw that and immediately thought "That would be cool with a wide angle lens." Of course, I've been rather obsessive about wide angle lenses these days as I'm very anxious to buy one.

Craig Lee said...

I like that shot too. When I zoomed in to 100% while sharpening, I could actually see down that one catfish's throat. I love the expressions on the gosslings as well. They seem confused about what those catfish things are beneath them.

John Brainard said...

You should post a 100% crop of that catfish. It would be neat to see what kind of detail your camera captured there.