a soldier’s tale (part iii of vi)

To get a better feel for the lens than could be felt in the bathroom mirror, we headed off to one of our favorite Hawaiian spots, the Honolulu Zoo.

We purchased the new lens at the soon-to-be defunct Circuit City. While I believe their business practices to be sound and ethically straight, that’s not what it takes to be thrown a life raft from Big Brother. Perhaps if the City had a shady underbelly they might still be afloat.

At any rate the Nikkor 55-200mm f/4.0 VR was reasonably priced and even included a sun hood, which I must say yields fantastic results. Very happy with the tonal quality of these first two shots:

Cool how the colors of these two images unexpectedly complement each other so well. (Her name is, of course, Franchesca.)

As many times as we’ve been to the Honolulu Zoo, we’ve never actually seen The Bear. So here, captured for the first time EVER in the history of Terry family zoo outings, is the bear:

One of the great things Tracy has taught our kids is respect for nature. Everyone knows you go to the zoo for the animals, but it never ceases to impress me how the kids always want to stop by the small botanical garden, as well. Here they admire some cacti:

Garden tour complete, we headed toward the hippo home. In another zoological first, the hippos were actually awake! Not only were they awake, they were active and playing with a huge ball, right up against the glass. The kids nearly shit their pants with excitement.

Animals, botanical gardens and hippos aside, one of my favorite things to do at the zoo (and most public places, for that matter) is to people watch. Hawaii is in general a great place to people watch due largely in part to the enormous concentration of tourists.

Not to be outdone by other camera-toting couples, this young family decided to film their entire zoo trip in video. Seriously. She just followed them around, video taping every step.

Raden met another little boy at the hippo tank, and as social as he is, it never takes him long to end up holding hands with his new best friend. Today was no different.

Only slightly less anticipated than the required visit to the Keiki Zoo is the pre-snack stop by the fake giraffe. Every visit they climb higher and higher until one day … well, Rad’s going to be standing on Gerry’s head.

Another fantastic thing about my sweet wife Tracy is her honest modesty. As beautiful as she is in her heart, she also has a pretty amazing exterior, yet she refuses to acknowledge it (in a genuine way, not in the typical “OMG I’m so fat” kind of way).

A typical end-of-day photo review session inevitably includes Tracy’s “ew look how old I look” comments. Anticipating my desire to capture as much as possible while home on leave, Tracy took a particular effort to “pretty up” each day. Even fake Christmas morning–scroll back up and look how pretty she is, even before breakfast!

Her atypical attention to outward appearance resulted in greater willingness to tolerate the camera being pointed in her direction. Exhibit A:

Delicious.

Since Tracy felt the desire to dress up fancy like, I decided to follow in kind. (In truth, I was partially motivated by my fresh tattoo ink, which really needed to stay out of the sun. Hence, the fancy pants long-sleeved button down.)

The Keiki Zoo is great. It combines the free-range feel of a petting zoo with an educational touch of excessive signage.

The goats are by far the most entertaining for us all.

River was having a grand old time watching the zookeepers carry around a tortoise:

The excitement quickly turned to terror when the tortoise was set free on the ground:

Finally, we visited a rooster.

Our zoo adventures took us through the day, and we all headed home for dinner and early bedtime.