Time to take a break! (Monkey Relaxing)

"Time to stop 'monkeying' around!"
Monkey taking a break

I caught this monkey taking a break at the Dubbo (Western Plains) Zoo last year. It seems an appropriate photo for today's post, as I've just finished a hectic week of playing at the Eisteddfod (along with younger siblings who were in other sections).

One of the pieces I played in this year's Eisteddfod was Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Opus 27, 3rd Movement ("Presto Agitato"). This is a quite an "agitated" piece, and certainly makes for a great performance, if you can play it well. Recently I found a video of Rowan Atkinson (better known as "Mr. Bean") miming this piece, along with the first movement of Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique". His performance is quite clever, and very amusing for anybody who's played either of these pieces. I've included the video below, and highly recommend you check it out. This guy is really amazing!

This photo taken with the Fujifilm S9600 digital camera.

Emus on the Roam

As I mentioned in the last post, I've recently had the opportunity to visit the Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, NSW. I took lots of photos (800+), so I've got lots of pics to post on this blog. For the first picture, I've chosen a subject that is uniquely Australian - an Emu.

The Western Plains Zoo has a good setup for photographing the animals. Instead of planting 8-foot fences between the people and animals, there is a sort of moat-and-wall arrangement, where you effectively stand on a mound of earth which puts you level with the top of the fence. This gives you a clear line of sight to the animals, which is great for photos

These emus were quite inquisitive, coming right to the edge of the "fence" to get their photos taken. With 10x zoom, I was able to get some good close-ups of the emus' heads.

The photo above shows a head-on view of the emu, while the photo below portrays the bird from the side. Both of these photos seem to portray a sense of action and alertness, as if the emu is utterly aware of your presence and is waiting for you to make the first move.

Overall the visit to the zoo was a fruitful exercise, and should merit a plethora of new photos for this blog. I look forward to sharing these photos, and I hope you will enjoy them too. I've been playing around with wide-screen photography, and the second emu photo in this post is an example of this. Hopefully I'll be putting up some of my shots in this format, it seem to convey a very different impression to standard 8x10 or 6x4 photography.

These photos taken with the Fujifilm S9600 digital camera.
Related Photos:

Lazy Sunday (Bearded Dragon Lizard)
Kangaroo in mid-air
Hairy Caterpillar