Zoo

I went to the Zoo on Saturday, with Lara. I had to observe primates and record data for an Anthropology class report. It was a bit of a drive, but the trip was worth it. It took Lara and I the whole afternoon to go all over the zoo grounds to cover all four subgroups of primates for data, but after, we were able to check out different animals and things. Before that, we had visited a nearby Museum which had exhibits about the history of mankind, with some links to primates and now extinct ancestors. It was very interesting. Lara and I took a ton of pictures. In fact, somehow I have more pictures from the museum than I have of animals.

I felt really stupid, getting home, when I realized while reviewing my pictures that my camera had been set to Auto the entire time, and not Shutter. All the pictures of moving animals were blurry. I definitely need to get used to customizing the camera settings for different scenarios. I’m used to shooting pretty stationary objects or people posing. On the bright side, Lara did capture a video of a sea otter playing with a ball. I’m still bitter that the pictures of the leopard are blurry though. We were literally 6 inches away from its face, only a fence between us.

Since Flickr has a file limit of 100mb per month, I plan to upload pictures to Picasa Web Albums from now on. The site in itself isn’t nearly as well established nor designed as Flickr, in my opinion, but the application / web-service partnership is very convenient and useful. The Picasa interface is nice. A big gripe I have about Mac photo management applications such as iPhoto or Aperture is that they make copies of every photo. I would like to use those applications to simply browse and edit photos, not make professional projects and have multiple exported versions. Well, Aperture is for professionals, but iPhoto should have better management. What’s the use of having an iPhoto picture database file that is pretty much unaccessible by other applications and programs, as opposed to folders of files?