In a previous A Bit About My Photograph entry I talked about a picture I made years and years ago of a bear lounging in his outdoor habitat at the Buffalo Zoo as the snow was starting to come down. I made it as part of a short project I was doing while being a teenager.  Most people get a chuckle when they see it. The rest of the pictures I made weren’t cheerful at all and can be viewed in my Gallery: The Zoo. They’re all environmental portraits, just like ones I could have made of people in their homes. Several of the subjects are looking at me as much as I am looking at them. When I made the pictures so long ago I felt like their eyes were penetrating me. I still feel that way when I look at them now.

I didn’t enjoy making this picture or the others like it, but I needed to make it.

I never went back to a zoo after this experience, except twice.  Years later when I was in San Diego visiting my son while he was in graduate school and more recently when I took his son to the zoo in Richmond.  Thankfully, zoos have come a long way in the fifty or so years since I made these photographs!

As mentioned in the previous entry I used my Nikkormat or possibly my Nikon F2 I bought later.  While I was lucky to have a 135mm (the only other lens I owned at the time) that I used for the photograph of the bear, this picture and all the others were made with the 50mm … either a f/2 or f/1.4. I owned them both but not at the same time, and both were great!

As much as the picture of the bear taking a siesta in the snow gives me a chuckle, I get a melancholy feeling when I look at this one. It’s a meaningful picture that needed to be made. That picture and the others I made for the project helped shape my feelings on photography … and life.

Stay well,

Michael