Eye-eye!

It was a breezy but bright Blip Meet at Whipsnade Zoo today - the company and cameraderie though,  (I know it should be 'camaraderie) was much warmer!  It was the usual pattern of coffee/chat- a few photos - lunch - a few more photos - tea and home.  A great day and wonderful company!  this is what's so special about Blip. 

Today's blipmeet consisted of... Black Tulip, (Ann) JohnRH (John)  (Ann) Bedswizzard (Bob), BOM (Bev), Nicoiseannie (Ann),  Chantler63 (Kathy), Lisa24270 (Lisa), Cathyben17 (Cathy), Hildasrose (Rose) with B4YUU (Christal) joining us for the first part of the meet.

Animals seemed a bit thin on the ground today - elephants difficult to view as they are having a new house built and are viewed in a place surrounded by a very obtrusive fence!  The tigers were asleep and the lemurs didn't like the cold so stayed indoors.  We did manage some photos of the rhinos - mother and son; the baby was born last September but has grown a lot since then.

After the poor effort from the lemurs and watching the elephants go for their walk we took refuge in the Butterfly House, partly to get warm again. You can imagine what happened to camera lenses in that humidity (and my specs) so it was quite a few minutes waiting for the glass to sort itself out and be able to take some pictures.  I opted to use my 50mm with an extension tube instead of my Sigma 105.  I had to get much closer to my subjects but ended up with some different shots; fortunately the butterflies are not twitchy about a camera lens virtually on top of them - they're twitchy enough anyway.  Focusing is trickier though, so I was pleased to see that are few are sharp - I deliberately kept a shallow DoF.

I have added an extra of the rhinos so you can see Bali is still cute but getting to be quite a big boy.

Thank you to everyone who has put my panorama of Tewkesbury Abbey onto page 1 of popular - it's still there today but I expect it will soon drop off.