Visit to Safari Park with x100v
Today was a day off at work and I've been feeling pretty restless with all types of stuff going on so I made it a point to get out of the house. San Diego has tons of things to do and last year I got a membership to the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park, which sounded like a perfect way to spend a day off and bring my new Fuji Film x100v along to take some photos.
The San Diego Zoo is very well known, but it has another location the Safari Park about 30 miles north of San Diego. I ended up arriving around 1 PM after a slow morning, but the sun was out with some nice clouds in the sky. Perfect conditions for clearing my head, seeing some animals and taking some photos.
So this is my first time really out shooting with the Fuji Film x100v. I've been shooting on Sony Alpha cameras since 2015, starting with A7II, and then A7III and now A7IV with 16-35mm f/2.8mm and 85mm f/1.4 GM currently in my camera bag, but I kept all that a home for a fixed 23mm APS-C point and shoot camera. This is a big change in how I shoot by not having the flexibility of busting out a lens for each scenario. Even with this limitation I found it fun just looking for things that caught my eye and framing. I did cheat a little using the digital zoom built into the x100v, which was nice as 23mm (35mm full frame equivalent) is pretty wide and the animals are typically pretty far away from the paths.
After a couple animals exhibits it was pretty clear that they just were too far away, so I really attempted to focus on things I normally don't shoot, nature and landscapes. If you have seen some of my other photos over the years, I typically shoot some form of action like concerts and sports, so focus on something more calm and static is pretty different, the first being needing to moving away from f/2.0 and shooting more at f/4 and even trying out f/11. After messing around and trying some things out, I'm pretty pleased with some of the photos above.
After getting lost a couple times and hitting some paths that were dead ends, I covered the whole park and ended up in one of aviaries and was able to get pretty close to some birds who were pretty chill getting their photo taken.
Overall I had a fun day up at the Safari Park. Got our of the house. Got some sun. Cleared my head a little. And challenged myself to look at the things around me a little different than what I was comfortable with.
