Zoos and wildlife sanctuaries are interesting subjects in their own right but are also great places to practice and prepare for photographing animals in the wild. Spend a day at your local zoo or wildlife park before heading off on safari and you'll discover the limitations of your equipment and how close you need to get to animals large and small to make strong pictures. This technique works best with a tele photo lens and if the animal is at least 2m from the cage. With compact cameras remember that what you see through the viewfinder is not what the lens sees. Place the lens through an opening in the cage wire, and then look through the viewfinder, even if you see wire it won't be recorded on film.
Birds are even harder to photograph than animals.
They're mostly small, rest high up in trees, fly off at the slightest disturbance and rarely sit still for very long. A 300mm lens is adequate for larger birds, but to have any hope of filling the frame you really need a focal length of 500mm or 600mm. A quick introduction to the trials and tribulations of bird photography is available in you're own garden or at local parks. His photographs also appear in more that 150 Lonely Planet titles, including Chasing Rickshaws and Sacred India , and in books published by Penguin, Random House, Times and Reader's Digest. Travel Photography is published by Lonely Planet Publication, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia.