I can’t show you the images I took there today until after the opening date. Though, I can tell you that I came within arms reach of Nautalis (a 150 KG Female Sea Lion), which was quite the experience. There’s nothing like having a creature that large size you up.

Something that really amazes me in all of this is intense curiosity of the animal’s the students have been visiting. You can really see it when the animals make obvious gestures at you. One girl was explaining to me that when she stuck out her tongue at one of the Gibbons (a small primate with no tail), it stuck its tongue out back at her. Who knows what the Gibbon was thinking.

Model of the Zoo's expansion

Questions from Students

Checking out the Sea Lions

Curiosity on both sides of the animal kingdom

This week, my son is involved with a program through the Edmonton Public School Board and the Valley Zoo where the students in his class get to act as junior Zoologists for the entire week of classes.

I’m going to be following them, taking photos and volunteering some help here and there, with the intention of capturing the moment where a switch in their young minds gets turned on and their lives are changed forever.

So fast forward to late January and here we are, back at this spot covered in snow with lots of long dead grass everywhere.

This is a bit of a treat because I actually lit this using the beauty dish that I made last year. I’ve used it a few times for some fun and an editorial assignment. It’s just now that I’ve had a chance to really utilize it. I like the sort of soft circle that it produces at around a 6 foot distance to the subject. It’s almost like a gridded soft box but, with a larger gradient around the hot spot. Closer to the subject the effect is quite the opposite, rich highlights and a sharp falloff that creates deep shadows.

There were certainly some challenges. We got out there near the end of the day, or when the sun goes down here in Alberta around 3pm. In my head I had this image of the sun being behind Leilani, backlighting the scene. The sun kind of changed my plans and hid behind some clouds making the scene more bleak. Cooler, almost non-existent shadows and just the approaching darkness made this a bit of a difficult lighting situation. I could have either totally underexposed the ambient light, or dialled the flash way back to balance it out. The problem with that is the dish requires a lot of power to light, so dialling it back actually creates an exponential loss of power from the light. I had a Nikon SB-800 situated in the dish set to almost half power. Which, effectively gave me around a 6 foot subject to light to get a proper exposure. Dropping it to a 1/4 power would have resulted in a 2 to 3 foot distance, which would have been too close to the subject and shown up in the image.

In this image the dish is about 5 feet from Leilani’s face at around a 45 degree angle. Close enough to create some noticeable shadows. The flash is set to around 1/2 power – o.3 EV and the camera ISO 125 1/160 @ F/3.5

The dish is off camera left from behind Leilani’s head. Settings for the flash and camera are pretty much the same.

The dish is around 10 feet away in this photo. Which, as I have mentioned creates this really soft light the further you get away from the subject.

I didn’t bother with the light in this image. With her topless I wanted to use a more subtle, softer light that didn’t take anything away (or add) to what was going on. It’s a natural photo, with a natural pose.

2012 is looking good so far. I’ve got plenty of work lined up and I’m sure there will be more on the way. Check out the video we did for Dancer in the Dark on Youtube. If you have any suggestions or questions that we could do another video on put a comment in the box below!