For Christmas a year ago, my wife got me a photography experience day at the British Wildlife Centre. The centre is only open at weekends and school holidays, so when I went on my visit last June, me and the half-dozen or so other people participating had the whole place to ourselves. I did get pretty snap-happy though – I took over 1,200 images which is why it’s taken me a while to edit the photos and write this post.
Given that we had the place to ourselves the experience day was fantastic. In most cases we were actually taken inside the animal pens with a keeper to get great shots, and the animals were usually tame enough to cooperate – either that, or they could be bribed with food to play ball. The keeper looking after us was also great at recommending what lenses would be best for any given animal, which helped take a bunch of the guesswork out of it all.
The first creature we encountered was this old fox.
We were told to use something in the 70-200mm range and I was happy to oblige – the 70-200mm f/4 L was the best quality telephoto lens I had at the time.
They told us this guy’s name but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. Clearly though, he was old and happy to spend his days being fed snacks in exchange for tolerating a bunch of enthusiast photographers.
Mr Fox eventually got a bit bored of the snacks and started wandering off, so we moved on from his pen.
Next up was the red squirrel enclosure. I had been looking forward to this one – red squirrels are really photogenic, and the most I’ve seen of one was a fleeting glimpse on Brownsea Island a year previously, when I wasn’t really ready with my camera.
Our time in this pen started out in a similar fashion, as the first few squirrels we encountered wouldn’t hold still, and managed to get close enough that one or other or sometimes both autofocus and AutoISO struggled to get a clean shot. Soon things calmed down, and some food was used to get them to sit down in some nice-looking spots. This tree stump in the middle of their enclosure was almost perfectly designed for photography.
I soon realised that 200mm wasn’t going to cut it and I switched to my 300mm, which I wasn’t entirely happy to do as I think you notice the difference in performance. It might be worth mentioning that at this point I’d started to seriously consider the 100-500mm lens I would ultimately buy a month or so later and this experience took me a great distance closer to buying it. In hindsight, what I should have done was hire it to try it out in anger, but hey-ho.
This squirrel was soon joined by a blue tit, which I don’t think was a resident and just happened to be passing by, which was a bit lucky for us.
It didn’t hang around long though and the squirrel was soon alone.
Not all of the squirrel photos were in the traditional pensive nut-eating pose. This one was in a bit of an action pose. I say ‘this one’, there was more than one squirrel but I couldn’t tell you if these photos all happened to be of the same squirrel.
This one looked a bit thin, but it managed to nicely fill the gap in the log.
Weirdly though, perhaps one of my favourite shots of the squirrels is this one, happily having a drink from a bowl. Possibly because it’s captured a lot of detail in its fur.
I think I’ve dwelled enough on the squirrels for now. The squirrel enclosure is actually open to the public normally, so I might actually come back here with my family at some point.
Next up, we were taken to an open area where we were set up for some macro photography with a dormouse. I’ll admit, I got quite a bit snap happy in this section, mainly because I was constantly trying to make sure I was getting a slightly fidgety mouse in focus, and partly to capture it in some good poses, most of which it wasn’t staying in for long.
We got very lucky with this particular part of the day. The greyness of the day made for some softer light, the background was nice and simple (and made for some nice bokeh when shot at f/2 in macro), and the mouse, although timid, occasionally held still enough to be in focus. The results were near enough what I’d have gotten in a studio. This next shot is one of my favourites.
I will still admit to throwing away quite a few of the images I took of this mouse for being out of focus, usually because I was relying on the autofocus a bit too much and it missed the mark.
We then switched to another plant, the yellow colour providing a little more contrast to the brown mouse compared to the reddish-brown hues of the previous plant.
I didn’t get many good shots with this prop, as more often than not the mouse managed to hide inside it quite a bit. Luckily we soon switched to another plant where there was nowhere to hide.
I soon closed up the aperture to help make sure that I missed the focus less often with the fidgety mouse.
I’m really pleased with these closeup shots, they look like something almost professional. Although my wife was a bit disappointed when she saw the behind-the-scenes setup, so I imagine you will be too.
Next up, a hedgehog was brought out and perched by a nearby tree. Unfortunately, being a nocturnal creature, he was a bit of a grumpy sleepy guy and didn’t really cooperate much.
We moved on to a different area, and changed tacks by shooting an owl.
Thankfully the owl stood still, helped by a leash on its leg kept helpfully out of sight. We clearly weren’t that interesting as it let out a freaky-looking yawn.
The owl turned around, and with the change of position came some better light.
Next up were some wildcats. They seemed to be expecting us.
Unlike my trip to the Big Cat Sanctuary, because these cats were small and reasonably unlikely to try to eat us, we were allowed inside their pen, so I didn’t have to contend with having a fence between me and my subject.
There were a few wildcats in this pen. Despite seemingly sitting close to one another for this next shot, I found that f/4 was too open to get both cats in focus, so I needed to close up to f/6.3.
Despite being given a bunch of fresh meat in order to cooperate, they didn’t look that happy about it.
One of them was pretty unsociable.
Presently, the trainer started throwing meat, in the hopes we’d be able to capture some great action shots. I did get this great shot of a cat ready to pounce.
I had quite a few goes at capturing the action shots, but I often fell foul of AutoISO not getting a high enough shutter speed for the overcast conditions. Eventually though I did get a few decent ones.
Eventually the cats grew bored of us and sated for treats, and we moved on.
Next up were the otters.
These guys were tricky to get interesting photos of. They tended to want to hide unless they were being given some fish, and then they’d only stay out long enough to eat it, which wasn’t a particularly photogenic thing. The rest of the time they’d hide in the long grass or going swimming underwater. Eventually (a word I seem to have used a lot in this post, I think I need a new thesaurus) they started swimming on the surface, where their brown fur made for a nice contrast against the thick algae.
After a little while they started getting a bit more confident with us, and I managed to get a few more shots of them out of the water. When they were wet the brown of their fur looked pretty muted with the grey light, so I decided to turn a few of the images into monochrome, which worked pretty well.
200mm at 1/200th of a sec at ISO 200 might make that the most uniform photo I’ve ever taken. Not that that combination of settings means anything in particular.
We moved on, and headed over to the badger paddock. This proved to be one of the more challenging creatures to shoot. They were very keen on staying under cover (of which there was plenty in their pen), and at this point in the day the sun was starting to come out, which makes for photographing something uniformly both black and white a bit challenging. I managed to get a few usable shots.
We closed out the guided portion of the day with a couple of very similar creatures, which means I’m not entirely confident in what they are. The names seemed memorable at the time but have since escaped me. Since I did at least once know what they were I decided to ignore my usual rule of not knowing and attempting to be humorously incorrect (or at least ignorant) and try to look it up.
By comparing pictures on the centre’s website and asking an AI, I can say with no real confidence whatsoever that this is possibly a polecat.
Unless it’s a stout.
We moved on to these smaller things, which might be weasels. They were very cute.
These guys were really tricky to photograph. They were very timid, easily spooked, and rarely stood still for more than a second or two. Combined with the fact the light was changeable and starting to fade a bit, I ended up with quite a few blurry pictures of a blurry creature that decided to move just as I fired the shutter. I ended up being pretty stubborn with it, not least because this was our last stop on the accompanied part of the day.
With that our guided day was over. The keeper had left us to make our own way out, and there wasn’t too much pressure to make a hasty exit, so many of us took the time to wander a bit and grab a few extra photos on the way. The first one that caught my eye was this frog.
And there was this polecat in a separate polecat section than the one we’d previously photographed.
And finally, we passed a keeper escorting another owl, who was happy to briefly pose.
And that was the end of the day for me. It was a great time, I’ve not been on such a well-guided photography experience day before, where the needs of the photographers were so well understood and we could be given a bit of advice too. I definitely recommend it if you’re interested in photographing a variety of wildlife. It also makes me want to try out some more photography experience days in some other subjects.
As you might expect, I took a few more decent photos than the ones I’ve shared above. Below is a gallery of a few more. I apologise that it’s a little big.
