barriers

When one does one's "nature" photography in a zoo, one must contend with barriers. Fences. Netting. Plexiglas. Auto-focus cameras like to focus on nice crisp lines (mine *loved* the zebras), so are apt to focus on the fence, rather than on the critter.

Reflection on the plexi can ruin your shot, with pics that show random bystanders in the reflection more clearly than the tigers you were aiming at. I'm sure there is a comment there, on how people are overwhelming the tigers' world..... But I wasn't trying for political commentary; I just wanted tiger pics....

Anyway.

For the first time, I managed to get the manual focus to do what I thought it should do (before, I'd been trying it for macro type stuff, and I think it just doesn't work in that close-up context).

You can see the fence in this pic, but (imh) it doesn't ruin the shot....