The summer is starting truly atrocious. Yesterday morning I had to scrape the ice off the car windows and today… it was snowing. We knew that the weather wouldn’t be good today but still not bad enough for the zoo, so we drove to the Orsa Bear Park. At first, the only problem was the wind, but then when we thought it would start raining, it actually started snowing. Well, a bit of snow doesn’t scare us, we just said that it’s better with the snow than with pouring rain and continued shooting.

What makes Orsa Bear Park different from Järvzoo is that they have tigers, leopards and polar bears. I already have some nice tiger pictures and semi-nice polar bear pictures, so what I really wanted from this trip was the snow leopards. A good picture of a Persian leopard would be a bonus, but I really really wanted a good snow leopard keeper. I just love those animals…

We were happy to see that now that they have two snow leopards (last time we visited, there was only one), they have put them in the same enclosure and they were moving about, which gave us a decent chance for photography. I kept shooting like crazy, hoping that something would work and something would be sharp. Focusing was a big problem because the wet chain link fence was shining just a bit too much and kept interfering with focus. But yes, something worked, and I was surprised to find out when I came home that some pictures that I was sure had failed, were in fact sharp. So now I have a whole bunch of snow leopard pictures, and I think the best way to take my snow leopards to the next level is to visit the zoo in the winter. Even if it felt like that today…