Highland Wildlife Park

Amur Tiger, originally uploaded by chored.

Last Saturday Rosie and I attended a Go Wild Scotland Photography Event at the Highland Wildlife Park near Kingussie.

For your money you get entry into the park for the day, accompanied by professional wildlife photographer Arron and his wife Kirsty. Arron is on hand to answer any technical questions you may have about photographing the animals and Kirsty has a wealth of knowledge about the animals themselves. There is no tuition per se and I felt I should have made more of Arron's expertese, but didn't really know what to ask.

The big attraction of the day out is that you get closer to the animals than you would as a normal visitor to the park. The tour started off by visiting Mercedes the Polar Bear, she is in an enclosure which you can normally only see from the car when you drive round the park, but we got to walk in and get right up to the fence. This all happened before the park opened and we gotto see her at feeding time, so got some great shots of her eating sweetcorn and swimming.

A similar setup is also in place for the Japanese Macaques where at feeding time you get to go through a gate and get a bit closer to the fence. I found the fence on the Macaque enclosure harder to get shots through, but it was still nice to get in there.

The other animals you get to see in close quarters are the Amur tigers, again you get through a fence and it is literally you on one side of the fence and the tigers on the other. The fence has nice big holes as well, so there's no problem with having to shoot through the fence to get good photos.

Rosie and I shared the A350 and the A700 on the day and I was surprised that there is little discernable difference in image quality between the two, some of my best shots were taken on the A350. I still prefer the A700 since it has a bigger viewfinder, screen and more buttons to access things like white balance etc. as well as more control over ISO etc. but the A350 is still nice to shoot with.

We were also trying out a lens I borrowed off my brother, the Tamron 70-300. It performed really well and is so sharp at f/8 which we had little trouble shooting with at ISO 400. I even managed some shots with my Sigma 400mm which came out really well, I think my feelings about that lens were dampended a bit when trying to shoot handheld in low light wide open, but stopped down in good light, it's sharp and manageable. If only it still had working autofocus.

If we're going to do this kind of thing more often, Rosie and I really need another zoom with a good range and I'm torn between getting the same Tamron as Neil and going for the Minolta beercan which almost every Sony Alpha owner seems to crave.

Overall, a great day out and worth the money if only for the special access to the animals. If I go on a similar course again, I need to get some tips from the Pros though as you are paying for their time as well as the access.