Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated here (as per the usual). Yow-Yow and I just got back from Barbados, WI. Awesome time. This is one of the many (something like over 500) shots I took down there.

This is essentially right out of the camera. Just a simple S-curve and crop. I couldn’t believe it actually. We were leaving the aviary and this Toucan, who was high in the trees the whole time, flew down. We walked back in, and he just hung out there on the rope fence for a good 10 minutes. All the while I was taking shots of him. He actually seemed to enjoy it, posing in various different ways.

This is actually the same type of monkey as yesterday, but black.  As you can see, I decided to play a bit more with filters, mostly because this was a pretty significant crop and after I removed the noise, I wasn’t happy with the quality.  The blur gives it a bit of an artistic flare I suppose.

Another picture from the zoo this weekend.  This is just a slight crop and a minor curve.  I really like the way he’s posing in this one.  It sucks that I didn’t realize I had it on ISO 1600 when I was taking these pictures.  There’s a few of a smaller monkey that are very cute, but not very detailed.  Hopefully I can do something with them, but I make no promises.

On Saturday, being that it was such a nice day out, Yow-Yow and I decided to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo.  Talk about packed.  Needless to say, I decided to bring my camera (figured I should take it out of storage…) and take a few pictures.  The macro lens really helped, but I wish I had something longer still than 105mm.  Oh well, maybe soon I will.

Anyways, this is a closeup of a dwarf crocodile.

At the Desert Museum there is an exhibit that is full of hummingbirds. It’s an aviary for just hummingbirds. You walk in and these little guys are flying all over the place. Definitely one of the best exhibits they have there. When you walk in there’s a sign that says to be careful because the birds will fly right up next to you in order to eat the bugs. While we were in there on lady had a brightly colored sweater on and there were two almost perched on her investigating.

Oh, I also love the blues that the sky has with the polarizer. Simply amazing.

These birds had a false sense of security sitting behind the fence.  I couldn’t believe how close they would let me get.

Aww, isn’t he cute? The squirrels down in St Petersburg were about as “friendly” as the ones I’m used to at the University of Illinois. I’m sure if you were sitting someplace with some food, they’d be more than happy to help themselves. This little guy came to see me after I made it look like I was going to give him food.

In other news, I’m going to be moving my sites to a hosted provider here in the next week. For $23 and some change for a full year, I couldn’t go wrong. Plus I have over 3 months to figure out if I even like it or not, since they have a money back guarantee. Hopefully it will work better than hosting it on my home internet plan, since that seems to become overwhelmed at certain times of the day.