I was at the zoo today, enjoying the ineffable smug satisfaction of rocking up next to the crowds of people all pinching at the screens of their iPhones and frowning while I pull out this fuckin' thing.

I may have also found some time in the margins to look at animals while I was there.

Ring-tailed lemurs, and I guess most small primates in general, always have such a face. I caught this one going "blep."

Shooting at the zoo is like training wheels for wildlife photography. You have many of the same challenges plus some new ones, but at least you have the advantage that your subjects can't escape.

Sometimes you'll catch these guys sunning themselves in a Buddha pose. This is as close as we got today.

Anything that climbs, flies, or leaps is obviously going to be in some kind of cage. One of the unique bugbears of being at the zoo is having to take pictures through the mesh of whatever the enclosure is made out of and still not have it look like crap. The recipe is to have as little distance between your lens and the fence as possible and conversely as much distance between the fence and the critter as possible, and use a huge aperture. Sometimes this imparts weird grid patterns into the final product anyway which are mildly surreal. And if you're quite unlucky you won't be able to escape the sun glare coming off of an especially shiny fence from washing out your exposure even if the fence itself is far out of focus.