My Work

by krishani jerome
(Sri Lanka)

I'm new to photography. The 1st picture I took from my kitchen. I modified the picture. I wanted an apple to look big.

The 2nd photo shot I took it from clip art and I modified it. I wanted the apple and the crow to be highlighted and the background to be dark.

The 3rd photo I took it in a zoo. I wanted it to be natural. Because of that I didn't modify it.

These photo shots I took from my Sony Cybershot 6.0 mega pixel camera. All are close up shots.

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I'm beginning to wonder if I should start a section for manipulated images. Not that there's anything wrong with manipulating photos (I've written about my thoughts on post processing and image manipulation here).

If I'm being completely honest I would say that I like photography to be photography and art to be art.

In other words I like my photography to be, more or less, a moment frozen in time; and I like my art to be a creation.

If you do read my article on image manipulation I've said that I think photo enhancement is a very good thing – and indeed has been going on since the birth of photography – but to my mind Krishani's submissions are more art than photography.

The photo of the parrot is of course clearly a photo, not a creation so I'll concentrate my thoughts on that one.

Taking photos in zoos is a wonderful pastime, but it's really difficult to get away from the fact that the animal is in a zoo. But there are things the photographer can do to disguise that fact a little.

So here are a few tips for photographing animals in a zoo.

• First of all, study your animal a bit. You may notice after a while that some animals have a favourite part of the enclosure that they keep going back to. Try to position yourself so that you can photograph this part of the enclosure easily and you will be ready for when the animal returns.


• If possible, avoid getting bars on the picture. You might find that you can poke your lens through the bars – if you can, do. If not, and if you have a digital SLR, select a large aperture on the lens (f2.8 would do) – this will give you a shallow depth of field and the bars will blur so much that they disappear from the shot. Click to read more on controlling depth of field here.


• Find out when feeding time at the zoo is. If you can photograph the animals when they are feeding you will get some lovely photos. They will clearly look like they were taken in a zoo, but this is sometimes unavoidable!


• Watch the background. It's easy for part of the man made enclosure to slip into a background, so keep an eye on the background as well as the animals. If there's a nice leafy part of the enclosure position yourself so that it's in your shot and wait for the animal to come along.

Thanks for the submissions Krishani, and I'll give some thought into setting up an area on the site for manipulated images.

Darrell.
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