April's Shower of Photos: Days 1 and 2

Jennifer of S/V Mari-Hal-o-Jen put out a challenge for this month:

If you would like to join me in a month of photos, please drop a comment into the comment box and I'll collect all our info into my seriously outdated sidebar. Set your own goals for the month or focus on a theme that interests you (Spring Flowers, macro photos, portraits, or perhaps the color green?) or simply have uploading one photo a day as your goal! Goodness knows that's all I'll get done some April days!

I hope to make April's Shower of Photos a little Loveliness to look forward to each day, won't you join me?

Photography is not my strong point but I'm going to give it a go, even though it is pushing me right out of my comfort zone. I think I will need a focus to avoid sinking into a paralysed, photo-less confusion, so I'm going to go with a "nature" theme. I only have an pocket-sized entry-level Panasonic digital camera. It takes better photos than the old Kodak I was using until it died last year, but a professional piece of kit it most definitely is not.

I got off to a good start as we took Star and Little Cherub to the zoo today. Plenty of photo opportunities there - though not as many as there would have been if I had remembered to buy spare batteries for the camera, which ran out of juice part way through the day. First, a close up of a lemur nibbling what looked like a piece of twig. The lemurs are in a walk-through enclosure, so it is possible to get up close and personal.


This rhino wasn't as near as he looks and we were firmly on the other side of the fence! He was pretty close, though. I would love to have got a shot of two magpies sitting on the back of an oblivious rhino, but they flew off.


The penguins have always been a zoo favourite of ours. Here are three Humboldt's penguins marching. Judging by his feathers the bird at the back must be a large chick. Behind them was a longer and better procession, but that was the point at which my camera died.


This is a poor quality photo as I had to go heavy on the zoom. My camera has a 3x optical zoom: after that it relies on digital zoom with a corresponding decrease in resolution. This 11 week old baby was such a cutie I had to include him, digital zoom or no.


Tomorrow I hit my first bump in the road. Buy camera batteries!