This is Liberty, the centrepiece (as it were), of the collection at Long Sutton Wildlife Park. This was a lucky capture - I was photographing some owls next to Liberty, when I looked up and caught him looking straight at me. I quickly fired off shots for about 20 secs before he looked away.
This is only the second time (excepting a 24 hour speed challenge) that I've shot a challenge entry on the first day - and on a free study to boot. I've had 29 days to edit this, re-edit this, curse myself I didn't shot a better shot in the first place, etc etc. i'm still not happy with it, wish i had more DOF in my original, but as you can imagine, I didn't really get time to fiddle with my settings.
A special thanks to Andi Ecce Signum for his editing suggestions in this shot. If you like this shot, why not donate some money to the fund he's set up in memory of his daughter here. Alternatively, why not visit your local zoo/wildife park/animal sanctuary, and support it financially or otherwise. Many of the less "commercial" zoos carry out lots of important conservation work on very small budgets, and contain lots of photogenic animals :-)
I'm hoping the dinging I might take for the technical flaws in this shot will be outweighed by the subject matter :-)
Oh and, for the record, I won the staring contest :-)
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