ZOO animals (sd wildlife park/Steinhart/seattle science center/Cougar mountain Zoo)

[Diver Dan]

Geez!!! Your only 19 and you have a Major in Ecology and a minor in Marine science??? Awesome shots!!! When did you graduate highschool? when you were 15???

[iceemn360]

haha Im a bit young for my grade> junior in college.

[greyhoundfan]

I'm digging the green tree boa shot..again..I like how you positioned the shot and focused on the eye and blurred out the head. how did you get it to be so clear. I'd guess that the boa was in a glass cage. Yet, i don't see any glass reflection. great pics!! love em' all.

[iceemn360]

I guess its all about the lens. That pict gets a lot of discussion. I was probably zoomed all of the way out at 300mm on the macro setting and at the lowest f stop > this lens only does F4.5 so its actually slow. Some people have said it looks like a F 1-2.8 or something. I didnt use a flash. all that i guess combines to a very very reduced Depth of field and so the background and the glass in the foreground arent even noticable. Im glad you like em!

[sandiegoryu]

Those are some *****ing colors. What camera are you using? Any post processing that helps?

Edit: I used the female dog word.. I can't believe even that's censored.

[iceemn360]

Thanks sandiegoryu. I use a pentax k10d 10.2 effective megapixels.. weatherproofed for rain/snow/ dust, shake reduction built into the body... its a great camera. I've had a lot of fun with it and put in into some very outdoor/rugged conditions and it has performed very well. the lens that i took these photos with twas a 70-300mm Quantaray Telephoto/macro. My camera is set to a high saturation and sometimes this can lead to oversaturation when things overexpose>> some of the macaw photos have this. but often times it creates wonderful true to life results. If any post processing is needed (the largest thing is color temperature and tint change) then I just use iphoto.

[NGN8DOGG]

what lens did you use for the parrot / butterfly close ups? Nice skillz

[iceemn360]

70-300mm Quantaray Telephoto/macro

basically the same as the tamron and the sigma of the same zoom range (the lens itself look identical between the three with the name being the only observable differnce)

its a great lens in my opinion. it occasionally suffers from Chromatic aberration (aka when the light rays bend to show aberrant rainbow colors) but over all its performed better than I could have ever imagined.

not bad for a 100-150 dollar lens...