We jump ahead quite a ways for this week’s Classic Photo Tuesday. The winter of 2009 hit me really hard, and I did almost nothing for several months. What I did was mostly being frustrated at the zoo because my 20D was really struggling. One of the main indoor sections of the Minnesota Zoo, the Tropics Trail, is lit largely by skylights. When they ice over in the winter, the light levels reduced enough to make it pretty much impossible with an older camera. So we got all the way to May before I got both a new camera and more willingness to spend time in the outdoor part of the zoo.

May 11, 2009. Minnesota Zoo. Click to embiggen.

I guess it’s appropriate that the first portfolio shot off of the 5Dii is thoroughly representative of how I felt that winter. Like this leopard, I was completely wiped out and ready to just flop down somewhere. That would last for quite a while – 2008 was very productive, but got there by throwing off a lot of excess energy, and it would take years to rebuild.

I’ve kept a print of this on the wall of my bedroom for a few years now, both as a reminder of those days and as an inducement to sleep. She’s very convincing.

Spent most of the day today dealing with a hard drive failure. I didn’t lose anything important, but it was an annoying amount of work. Fortunately I have a bunch of things waiting to be posted, including some baby leopards.

March 11, 2013. Minnesota Zoo. Click to embiggen.

I just love the textures of the spot pattern on leopards.

Most new photo processing is going to have to wait until the replacements show up next week, which I guess means I’ll have more time to write. I had been planning to upgrade my hard drive situation sometime soon anyway – with all the panoramas I’ve been doing I really need a solid state drive on this computer – but I would have preferred it not to be today.

I’d much rather be thinking about leopards.

This week Classic Photo Tuesday falls on a Wednesday again. Hey, it was a holiday weekend. Besides, it’s a tapir, perhaps nature’s perfect avatar for a lack of a sense of urgency.

October 26, 2008. Minnesota Zoo. Click to embiggen.

Animal feet are fascinating to me. There’s so much variation, and feet aren’t something we tend to pay attention to, so there’s often a lot of detail there that you wouldn’t notice or think about without a photograph. You probably did not expect a tapir to be pink.

In many ways our perception of animals is formed by the language of stylized art, which tends to focus mostly on heads. They’re readily distinguishable, and easy to overlay with anthropomorphic facial expressions. Only the most subtle artists do anything with animal body language at all, and almost nobody draws interesting feet. But while they’re hard to draw, feet can be very characteristic and expressive themselves. They’re worthy of more attention.