Nature's Best Photography Students Blog

I’m going to set the scene… Think, scorching hot desert. Think, the heat is melting your brain cells and you’re going crazy. As you trudge up the concrete mountain some people call a hill you see a mist. Could it be? Water? It’s like the world collapses away and you zone in. You finally reach the mist, knock over a few kids and just stand there. It’s like you were just transported to a tropical island.
Then you open your eyes and you realize you lost your 5-man project group, fail. You hold tight to your colossal camera bag, which in this heat feels like it weighs a ton, and run up the mountain (I mean, hill).

That was basically my day. My hot, sweaty, think-I-might-die day. But despite feeling like my shoes were melting I had a great time behind-the-scenes. Ever want to know what was behind the ‘STAFF ONLY’ door? Well now I do!

I had my Nikon D40 snapping away getting all the pictures possible. Our project was supposed to be about the ‘black sheep’ of the zoo, though I felt like they had a lot of traffic, could have been that they thought we were important and followed the cameras but that place was hoppin’!

Talked to three different trainers about three different ‘black sheep.’ But these animals weren’t sheep; no, they were… caracals, sloth bears, and chameleons!

Then to top off the day, I held a snake! Yes, me, crazy I know.

I usually shy away from anything that could kill me but by that time all my brain cells had melted. So here I was, me and Pauly D (he was a pine snake from

New Jersey, we got to name it!)— just hanging out, with a trainer of course.
It was a good day, can’t wait to go back to the zoo and see everything else! — Keep shooting! adrianne

Filed under: Adrianne D'Angelo, Photojournalism Tagged: | behind the scenes, zoo