Last weekend I had an opportunity to visit Auckland Zoo with two keen young photographers, my daughter, Edin and her friend, Anna. Since I had last visited there have been some really great upgrades to the native bird displays which is where we spent a lot of the day. There are now a number of walk-through enclosures with recreations of natural habitat for the birds on display. My favorite was the offshore island habitat (including sounds of crashing waves) displaying Antipodes Island Parakeet and the flightless Campbell Island Teal. Other enclosures recreate High Country, Bush, Wetland and a Nocturnal habitat with Kiwi and Morepork.

Wildlife and Bird photography, like all skills, benefits from regular practice and zoos can offer an opportunity to practice with species that would otherwise be very  difficult to access in an environment where they are habituated to people so long, expensive lenses aren’t required. All the images here were made with a 70-200 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter on a full frame camera body. The girls both used 70-300 zooms on DX crop cameras. The recreations of natural habitat can result in some very pleasing images providing you concentrate on backgrounds, camera angle, pose, posture, behaviour and eye contact, as you would have to in the wild. A few visits to a zoo to practice before a planned trip to a wild venue would be time well invested.