Exuvia.net

Animal emotions are hard to pin down. Dolphins always look like they're smiling, some dogs just have that happy look, but with those rare exceptions, emotion is hard to get across in an animal portrait. I mean you often just get sleepy animal, or mad animal.

In this case, I think it's all in the eyes. Sure this lion was behind 2 inches of plexiglass. Sure he was just chilling out on a rock next to a lioness, but look into his eyes, and there's no doubt in my mind he's still got a fire burning inside.

This was of course at the SF Zoo. As stated before, I shot this through 2 inches of pretty dirty plexiglass. I don't blame them though, I wouldn't want to be the guy in charge of cleaning the inside of the windows. It looks ok at this scale, but once you zoom in it's pretty noisy. I don't know if it's because of the cloudy day, or maybe it's because of shooting through the plexiglass.