KL Bird Park revisited

It was a lovely, sunny Friday afternoon. I had just gone through a rather painful visit to the dentist, hence my teeth were hurting a little. Nonetheless, I decided to make good use of the rest of the afternoon by visiting the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park.

The last time I recall visiting the Bird Park was about 6 years ago. The park hasn't changed much (the underutilized parts of the park look shabby as usual, but the ticket price has gone up a fair bit. Its now RM 25 per Malaysian adult (or RM 48 for foreigners). With RM 25, I can have a comfortable dinner for two at the local Chinese stall. Oh well, there's a price to pay for everything I guess.

I brought along the aged Olympus E-3 with the versatile Zuiko 50-200 SWD lens. I used Large Fine JPEG files instead of RAW because the camera does a good job with the white balance and colours. I also boosted sharpness +1 so that I didn't need to add sharpness during post processing.

The 50-200 SWD lens is spectacular. With a usable, hand holdable range of 100-400mm due to the 2.0x crop factor, I was able to zoom in right on the birds and capture every exquisite detail. The autofocus was snappy, albeit not accurate at all times. The birds were moving very rapidly, and I had to make the best of my skills to shoot them when they were relatively stationary.

Although the 43rds sensor is smaller than full frame ones, it was quite difficult to get accurate focus at its maximum zoom length (400mm) because the depth of field is only several centimeters across.

Around 330pm, there was a bird show at the amphitheater. No doubt, since the shows are run twice daily, both trainers and birds are very well versed with what they were supposed to do.

This macaw, smarty has the ability to add numbers, as long as both numbers don't exceed the sum of 15. He answers by ringing the bell.

This is a very hungry looking ostrich. I fed it some stale vegetables, which it gobbled down its throat gleefully.

I returned to the parrot enclosure after the show. It seems like these bird's love to be photographed. How intriguing !

Birds of the same feather flock together.

The keeper placed papayas on the tree branches for the birds to feed on. It was an exciting scene to behold.

Monkeys were aplenty, scurrying through litter at the bird park for their food.

There's a story about this hornbill. I saw it perching above a cage, while another friend was on the ground, holding a fruit in its beak. It was trying to feed the fruit through a hole to another hornbill in the cage. It was very touching to see the hornbills caring for each other., sometimes even better than how we humans do it.

This bird is very common in the park. Its not so pretty, but I shot it anyway.

Peacocks were in abundance. Its just that the tail feathers of the males were all broken and not so vibrant. Perhaps its because they drag it along the floor too much.

I'm fishing for my dinner.

Its a pity that the flamingos in the park aren't as vibrantly coloured as those that we see on Animal Planet.

A limitation with the E-3 is that it still doesn't perform very well in low light if you have to boost the ISO, unlike other full frame cameras. I could get an E-5 to solve the issue, but whats the point if Olympus isn't developing the E-system anymore since I have invested so much in it ?

Although I have moved on from my E-3, I still miss it from time to time. Its like an ex-girlfriend. I know she's around, but I don't know her as well as I used to because I don't catch up with her everyday anymore. Quite sad, ain't it so ? That's life, I guess.

Cheers, and good night.