A Buddha photo taken on a trip to Sukhothai, Thailand with my wife and brother a few years ago. While I don’t consider myself to be a spiritual person, at least in the traditional sense, I do have to admit to feeling a sense of wonder walking amongst the various artifacts of one of the old Thai Kingdoms (a lot of people don’t realize that Bangkok hasn’t always been the center of activity for Thailand).

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This Buddha picture was taken a few years ago in Sukhothai, Thailand. I didn’t, however, use any real computer special effects to take this particular picture. I dropped the shutter speed way down on the camera to do a long exposure, then I manually zoomed the lens in and out to see what would happen (I did a quick auto correct on Picnik, as I normally do, to clean the picture up a little bit).

Note: The Sukhothai Airport is one of the smallest, but cutest, airports I’ve been to.

It was almost impossible getting a picture of this baby Western Lowland Gorilla at the San Francisco Zoo. Like many other toddlers, he was totally rambunctious and spent most of the time rolling and jumping around.

This Western Lowland Gorilla at the San Francisco Zoo may have been in the mood for love (or he was just hungry, which is probably far more accurate than any kind of hormonal drive).  It is very hard for me not to be anthropomorphic with members of the primate family, since their expressions are not that much different than ours when displaying anger, sadness or other items we define as uniquely human.

Given the bad rap that Oakland gets,  not to mention that it is always second fiddle to San Francisco in many ways, I was actually quite surprised at how nice the Oakland Zoo is. Most of the animals in the zoo had a great deal of space in their exhibit, and they were generally pretty active compared to the animals in the San Francisco Zoo (perhaps it is due to the foggier nature of San Francisco).

This White-Handed Lar Gibbon was obviously very deep in thought when I took this picture. I’ve also had the good fortune of seeing gibbons in the wild while in Thailand, and I’ve also been to the Gibbon Rehabilitation Center in Phuket, Thailand (former pets or injured animals that they try to rehabilitate to put back in the wild).

Note: It is very common to see people with Gibbons that you can take your picture with in Patong. Please don’t take your picture with these animals, as cool as it may be, because the gibbon is only there because the mother was killed to get the infant. I made this mistake on my first two trips to Thailand:-(

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I must say that taking pictures of any of the tamarins at the San Francisco Zoo is quite daunting. In addition to the Pied Tamarins being extremely active (jumping all over the place), the glass display really works against you because of finger smudges on the glass, flaring from the sun, and the buildup of condensation.

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The Snow Leopard is one of the more mysterious of the big cats (little is known about them because they live at fairly extreme altitudes). As I hadn’t been to the San Francisco Zoo in a little over a year, it was nice to see that the Snow Leopards were moved in to a public viewing area so I could actually take photographs of them (I believe the two leopards were in the cat house for quite some time, which wasn’t accessible to the public following the tiger attack there several years ago).

The one drawback about San Francisco Zoo these days: all of the dangerous mammals have quite a bit of cage and fencing around them now, so taking photographs of some of the animals isn’t quite as easy as it used to be.

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Panda bears seem to be the least aggressive of all of the bear species to me. Polar bear attack? Heard of it. Grizzly Bear? Definitely. Even the Malay Sun Bear seems like it could be aggressive towards humans.  But I haven’t heard of any stories (of a wild panda at least) attacking humans.

This photo was taken at the Chiang Mai Zoo in Thailand a few years ago. Believe it or not, the Thai TV stations even have a channel dedicated to the Panda Bears housed at the zoo (the pandas apparently like sleeping a great deal!).

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Cute little guy (or gal, didn’t check that closely). While I didn’t have the opportunity to see the orangutans in Borneo in as natural of a setting as I would’ve liked at the Rasa Ria Reserve) , it is simply amazing how you can see how “human” these animals are with some of their mannerisms (very much like a young child, dependent on help and desiring affection from a figure regarded as a parent ).

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