Crossing More Adventures Off the Bucket List

Everyone should have a bucket list and actively plan to experience things on that list.  If you're me, you have multiple bucket lists covering a variety of activities.  This year, I managed to cross off 2 items on the "Interact with Cool Animals" list within the course of 2 months:

• Pet a Penguin: done!!
• Feed some Ungulates

Yes, I used the word "ungulates" - partly because it's a funny sounding word and partly because it sounds way more intelligent and downright cool compared with "rhinos & giraffes."

Originally, my birthday was supposed to entail trekking through Santa Barbara wine country with a new wide angle lens birthday present in tow.  That plan was pretty much obliterated once I was rear-ended the week before my birthday and prescribed muscle relaxants for the ensuing back pain... aka drinking centric activities were going to be a no go.

No matter, I decided I wasn't going to let that ruin my day and decided I wanted to do something so memorable, I would look back years from now and remember the fantastic birthday I had and not have a rear-end collision define this 2014's marking of another revolution around the sun.

That something memorable turned out to be feeding giraffes and rhinoceroses at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park as part of their caravan safari, which basically was a 2 hour drive through the exhibit!!  The guide provided all kinds of facts and explained animal behaviors as they were happening right before our eyes.  I think it could have been better only if Sir David Attenborough himself had been there narrating in his dignified British accent.  Something I took away from the experience is that rhinos are actually rather docile and love apples!!

Not the best time of day for photography and most of these pictures ended up being more snapshot-y than artistic image, but it was still an amazing experience.  And I'm proud of the fact that I have seemingly fixed my under-exposure problem by checking the histogram outputs and not just relying on the internal light meter.

All in all, I can't wait to head back during more favorable lighting to photograph more interesting animals, having a membership is the best!

Rhino smelling & listening to our caravan... apparently, their eyesight isn't great.

Fun fact - rhinos actually wear down & shape their horns to their liking and said horns are made of keratin

Fed a rhino!! Contrary to popular belief, they're actually so docile and sweet... the cows of the savannah!!

Giraffe interested in the acacia leaves we've got

Making the giraffe reach for it!  I love her expression and that purple tongue in this!!

Crossing another one off the "Interact with Cool Animals" bucket list!

Alright, didn't get to play with the tigers, but the new Tiger Trail exhibit was really cool!!  Actually took this photo through glass & managed to minimize the reflection & glare.

More Safari to See!

Active Shooting Hours: 3
Review Hours: 1
Hours to Date: 159

Mmm... 2kids Beer...

I realize that it's a little early in the morning to be posting about beer, but it is Hump Day, after all. Not to mention, my latest life goal is to go to bed earlier and get up earlier than the masses to get more of what I want to do (i.e. reading, blogging, plotting world domination, etc.) done. At least for the past two weeks, I've been successful at that endeavor and once past the initial alarm-induced groan, haven't regretted getting up early at all.

Anyway, back to the wort of the matter. I spent the past weekend in San Diego, which is never quite complete without a stop for craft beer. Moreover, in my opinion, no trip to San Diego is complete without a stop specifically at 2kids Brewing Company - a nanobrewery with a flair for unusual ales, but none of the pretense that typically comes with that kind of self-description.  I've known brewers Sam & Rob since high school and have watched them go from beer connoisseurs to prolific homebrewers to successful business owners with the opening of their tasting room nearly a year ago. And had the privilege of drinking some tasty and wittily named beer all along the way.

While I've been to their establishment previously, it was early on in this project and I felt that I didn't do their beer justice with the pictures I took then. It was exciting to return with camera in tow to properly capture some of their brews.

Photographically speaking, the challenge I experienced here was the indoor lighting. In the past several months, I have found myself increasingly preferring to shoot in natural, outdoor light, but that presents a major limitations when the interesting stuff is actually inside. To make this even more of a challenge (she says as if the following was intentional), we went to 2kids directly after dinner out and I had forgotten to bring my flash bounce along. I only had my trusty 35mm lens and built-in pop up flash at my disposal. No matter, I managed for the most part with some guerrilla flash diffusers improvised from my hand, a coaster, a translucent envelope, and a dollar bill.  Unexpectedly, the best results were obtained between my hand and the back of the coaster.

In any case, if you find yourself in the San Diego area, you should go check out 2kids, taste their brews, and have a chat with Sam & Rob yourself. Address and tasting room hours are below - they also come up on Google and Yelp searches for anyone like me who relies almost entirely on various device(s) to navigate through life.

2kids Brewing Company
8680 Miralani Dr. #123
San Diego, CA 92126

Tasting Room Hours:
Thursday:  3:00 - 9:00pm
Friday:       3:00 - 10:00pm
Saturday:   1:00 - 10:00pm
Sunday:     1:00 - 8:00pm

Its 5 o'clock somewhere!

Taps

The beer is so clear, you can see the effervescence. Almost poetry.
Diffusing the flash didn't work so well here, unfortunately.

Dat foam.

My favorite: Winning! Chocolate Stout.  All I need is some vanilla ice cream...

I really did buy a growler and a half. And then some. These just happened to make the photo.

More Cheers

Active Shooting Hours: 1.5 hours
Review Hours: 2.5 hours
Hours to Date: 138

You Can Pet Them!?

That has been the highly consistent response from everyone when they heard about and saw our photos from the weekend. Long story short: we met and pet a couple of penguins as part of a private tour at SeaWorld San Diego - a surprise I arranged for the boyfriend's birthday.

Of course, it's en vogue right now to regard SeaWorld only with scathing vitriol given the release of the documentary Blackfish, but I find most such work to be unfairly one-sided, pushing one very specific agenda. And personally, while I detest making animals do stupid anthropomorphized tricks and disagree with that aspect of their business model, I do think there's value in having animals in a properly administrated zoo/aquarium setting for education purposes and to spread awareness of real conservation issues which are easy to ignore when they're occurring half a world away.  

The up close tour was especially good for education and awareness - we were taken through the penguin encounter exhibits with a guide who provided a background on penguins and explained that as we head into the summer in the northern hemisphere, penguins are heading into winter, which is also their nesting and hatching season. To keep them on schedule with their natural habitat, the keepers gradually dim the lights and eventually turn them off entirely in the penguin exhibit to mimic the changing of the seasons. We went through a brief sanitation process, stepped through a foot bath, and proceeded to the offices and back area where we actually met a Macaroni penguin up close. We learned more about the species, anatomy, and SeaWorld's facilities and interacted briefly with her, including petting her gently on her head and back, which was everything I've ever dreamt it would be and more. 

As part of the tour, we were also able to head into the back corner of the actual penguin encounter and see all of the birds they have on exhibit. Some of them were interested in our presence - in particular, a 30 year old male Emperor penguin named King Tut, who actually enjoys letting people pet him!! There is something so indescribably breathtaking about interacting with an actual emperor penguin - they're even more amazing in real life than even documentaries would suggest. Penguins are surprisingly soft and fluffy!! Their feathers are much softer than their waterproof qualities make them sound.

While we were at SeaWorld, we also saw a few other exhibits as well and fed some sea lions, but the penguins were absolutely, hands-down, the best part... and my best zoo/aquarium experience to date.

In terms of the photographic experience, the key this session brought to me was just the importance of a fast lens, the law of large numbers, and the importance of cropping.  Especially with quick animals, I used the multi-shot feature to get a quick series of shots, resulting in at least one good shot from the bunch.  In the penguin exhibit, I actually abandoned my DSLR altogether in favor of my iPhone because the DSLR was having trouble focusing in the dim lighting conditions.  Additionally, since access was limited, I couldn't use the simple "just get closer" method to properly frame a shot.  Thus, I had to ramp up the picture size and then crop many of the photos in post-editing to get visually interesting compositions and not just another snapshot.

Pair of Magellenic penguins from South America. Contrary to popular belief, not all penguins live on Antarctica & need frigid temperatures. These actually live in a mostly temperate environment & only need access to chilly waters.

The macaroni penguin we met up close!!

The penguin exhibit from the back corner, the lights outside the exhibit were turned off and they were gradually dimming the exhibit inside to mimic the approaching Antarctic winter.

King Tut.  Petting a penguin is totally in my Top 10 of best life experiences so far!!

Dreams do come true!!

More Marine Mammals & Birds

Active Shooting Hours: 3

Review Hours: 2

Hours To Date: 134

Fourth Quarter Fumble

Fourth quarter has been busy.  Like really busy.  Like crazy busy.  I've been all over the place either preparing for meetings or actually in meetings.  I'm really glad I got some shooting time in this past weekend at the San Diego Zoo.  

As it turns out, the animals are way more active in the morning and I got several great shots of animals actually up and about.  And in many ways, I found a lot of humanity in their expressions and mannerisms.  Hopefully, I'll have some more time to clock some hours in the coming weekends even amidst big meetings.

An indignant owl

Koala!!

A glorified kong toy for a panda... cinnamon biscuits are inside!!

Gorilla daydreams

Water drops on a green mamba snake - probably my favorite shot of the day

Active Shooting Hours: 4

Review Hours: 3
Total Hours to Date: 77

A Sanctuary from the Heat

It's been hot.  As in, I worked up a sweat putting on make up this morning hot.  And worst of all, it's been humid.  Sweating is not at all helpful when it's this muggy out.  Instead of evaporation wicking away heat to leave you cooler and more comfortable, you're now just soaked in sweat in addition to still being hot.  This seems like a flawed adaptation to me... as if the entire human race got the whole sweating thing down and then called it a day and never developed a way to deal with heat when the air is too saturated with moisture for evaporation to work its magic.

I'm sure people from around the country (and the world) will tell me this is their normal, "it's not that hot" and to quit whining... but fantastic weather is precisely why I pay a premium in both taxes and the cost of living to live where I live and dammit, I'll whine about it because I can.

Anyway, to beat the heat (and extend the bacchanal debauchery that is Birthday Week), we headed down to the Stone Brewing Company's World Bistro & Gardens in Escondido for a brewery tour and to cool off with some deliciously hoppy IPAs.  And so I could get some shooting in... although photographic skill (like many other skills) deteriorates quickly once drinking is factored into the equation.  While the creativity in composition might have been there, the hold-the-camera-steady motor skill was totally not happening later in the afternoon.  Fortunately, I managed to get plenty of shots before succumbing to beers with ridiculously high ABVs.  And even better, I wasn't driving and had all afternoon to recover.  As it turns out, getting older means day drinking gets harder.

Beers I had today:
Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale
Arrogant Bastard Ale
Ruination IPA
Levitation Ale
RuinTen IPA - perhaps my new favorite, because it's hopped up like crazy, yet still pleasantly light, tropical, and citrusy, and a whopping 10.8% ABV.

Absolutely beautiful grounds

You would think there would be gargoyles all over the garden, but there were none.  In fact, in the entire place, I counted 3 and this was the only statue, which apparently they found at Lowe's.  Yes, normal people ask beer brewing & related questions during a brewery tour... having Wikipedia'd all of that already, I ask about the lack of gargoyles.

Beer, hanging out in bourbon & Bordeaux wine barrels and soaking up deliciousness

Taken with the iPhone.  I love me some hoppy goodness.  Hoppity hop hops.

Hours to Date: 17

Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!

Ironically, I didn't actually go see or photograph any of the animals mentioned in the title of this post... the San Diego Zoo sits on 100 acres and I was too tired to hike all of the hills to see everything.  The beauty of having an annual pass is not feeling obligated to spend the entire day there.  I was good with hanging out for a couple of hours. 

Unfortunately, the light was pretty harsh since it was mid-afternoon, so the colors came out kind of harsh and flat, but at least I got some entertainment out of watching animals hang out and do their thing.  Most of the animals were napping in the heat of the day, I'll have to try and make it back to the zoo either very early or later in the day.  I did get to play around with my 50mm-200mm lens, which allowed me to get closer shots of animals that were farther away.

Flamingo chicks are pretty funny looking... little puff balls with fat legs

Naptime!  Takes some kind of balance to sleep like that.

Koalafornia!  Apparently, the San Diego Zoo has the largest herd of Koala outside of Australia

It was pretty warm, so the "drop bears" as they're colloquially known, were mostly napping.

Watching them nap made me sleepy too!!  What a squishy-face.

Show-off.  This bird was squawking up a storm too.

My thoughts immediately after getting this shot: I just took a picture of a flamingo butt.

Rhino - totally reminds me of a stegosaurus

Smiling for the camera

Hours to Date: 13

Half Day Friday: Beach, Beer & BBQ

One of the many perks of my job is the ability to take half days on alternate Fridays during the summer, and yesterday, we used it as a reason to throw a going away BBQ for a guy who's going back to school.  I'm pretty sure there is no better way to ring in the summer than with a BBQ at the beach, which I then rounded out with happy hour with a friend who happens to live in San Diego.

The only casualty I incurred was some sunburn because I forgot to reapply sunscreen amidst moving around trying to take quality photos and make up for yesterday's laziness.

Still, despite the potential sunglasses-tan-induced raccoon eyes, added some time to this week and took some action shots instead of still subjects.  Photographing moving things reminds me a lot of skeet shooting... you follow the movement and then pull the trigger at the apex - in this case, once the subject gets into an interesting or visually striking position in the frame.  With the pier that juts into the water near the surfing area, I was at a pretty good angle to catch some surfers doing their thing.

But first, an homage to BBQ, which I'm pretty sure should just be its own food group entirely.

Chicken & hot links: yum, yum, and more yum!

Fall-off-the-bone ribs.

Surfer, f/8 @ 1/500s, with the colors punched up a little in Picasa because the light was kind of bleh

Just about to lose his balance - I love the reflection of his shadow in the water.

Fat pigeon that bullied 2 other pigeons out of the way for this perch - what an asshole. Nikon D3100 f/5.6 @ 1/640s.

Pier, as seen from the beach

If only life decisions were this simple - colors punched up in Picasa

Hours to Date: 8