I suppose everyone takes a lot of meerkat pictures. ; They're very photogenic animals, and Animal Kingdom makes it easy to get pictures of them. ; With my 400mm lens I was able to closer to them than ever before and got some stuff I was fairly happy with. I call this next one "the morning after". ; I like to imagine that the meerkats had a blowout party the night before and this is the aftermath. ; I wish I could have gotten a cleaner shot of that, but they weren't as stationary as it might look, they were moving constantly and this was all I could get before they moved on. And now for another bird in flight. ; A rather glaring dynamic range issue, but.. I'm fairly proud of it, another split second grab that was probably mostly luck. And now.. I present to you, The King. ; Thank you, thank you verra much. ; If only I'd had the 400mm on this time, as is this was shot at 184mm. ; I look back and wonder why I didn't zoom in all the way to 200, this is fairly heavily cropped. AK is also a good place to get Komodo Dragon shots. ; I've had access to them at other venues, but never with open air line of sight like this. ; Once again, the 400mm F5.6 in action. I walked around AK with the 400mm mounted to my camera for quite a while. ; I didn't many great shots with it on the safari ride, the cheetahs were in the shadows and while I caught them, the shot was probably worse than what I've gotten of them with 200mm. ; Maybe I can find a few keepers from that run later, but for now I have one more unconventional application of the 400mm. DeVine. ; I was just too lazy to change lenses, but I think it worked out. Hey.. she's an animal. ; Sort of.
Those are all fantastic shots. I think half the fun of meerkat photos is thinking up funny captions for them.
The 80-400VR is a heavy lens and I found it hard to shoot with on the safari ride vehicles but, on the trails, it shines like in your Komodo Dragon and Meerkat shots. ; BTW, I remember some post-party mornings just like that! ;