Close up of an Orang-Utan
Flickr Link
In my last post I shortly mentioned that I was in Berlin for a two-day trip last week. One of these two days was pent in the Berlin Zoo, which is has the most types of different animals in the world (according to their website) and is the oldest zoo in Germany. It’s located directly in the city center of Berlin but you can’t really tell when you are in the zoo because it is so peaceful and quiet. Only when you get to the edges do you hear any cars or other big city noises.
The zoo was just declared the best zoo in Germany by stern magazine, one of the best and most-read news magazines in Germany. Their main criteria was the condition of the animals and their enclosures. The Berlin zoo has a lot of very old, very beautiful houses for their animals, which sometimes have been converted to housing for different kinds of animals nowadays because the original habitants need bigger enclosures. There were very few instances where I thought „these poor creatures“, which I think is a good sign that zoos are really moving forward and are catching up with what animal-friendly housing should look like. Many of the animals also had offsprings with them, which is also always a sign that the animas are satisfied with their living arrangements. Even if it cannot be as good as their natural habitat would be.
Thursday was the hottest day this year (so far) with 35ºC (95ºF), which was pretty exhausting seeing how it took us over 5 hours to see the whole zoo. Additionally, I had to carry my backpack with my spare lenses in it. Most shots were done using my Canon 75-300mm IS lens, which is a really astounding lens, especially for capturing animal portraits in the zoo. As a second lens I used my Canon 60mm Macro lens for the shots I did in the Aquarium, which also houses all reptiles.
It was a beautiful day and as was to be expected, I took almost 1,000 photos out of which almost 400 pictures are worth keeping and 140 of which are really noteworthy (to me, at least). So you can find these 140 pictures in a slideshow on my site. Additionally, I made an overview page for all my photo albums for quick navigation. Feel free to check the pictures out – hopefully the slideshow should work in all browsers, if you are experiencing problems, make sure that you have the most current version of Flash installed.
