Till yesterday it looked like that I have to choose a black and white selfportrait as the picture of the month. It was a fine shot - no doubt - taken with the D2H and the Sigma 1.4/30 at f1.6 - a classical self portrait in a mirror.

But yesterday I called my dealer and asked if the special tripod head from Velbon for my new travel tripod has arrived. It was there but he also had a little suprise for me: a D200. I drove there directly from work and got it. I played around with it in our livingroom and like a child I nearly couldn´t find a sleep while waiting for tomorrow. It was the friday before new years eve and I left the office at 11.55am. The weather was very special: it was about -5 Celsius and very windy but I went to the zoo as I always do with a new camera.

While driving there I already had some pictures in mind: the lynx, the penguins and maybe even the pandas in snow an a stormy day. I used my favourite lens and my largest tripod. I also packed my D2H as I have no spare battery for the D200 at the moment. After all the posts at dpreview I was a little bit nervous about the battery life of the D200 but the battery lasted longer than my flash cards. After 4GB of images ( 410 images ) I had to leave. Maybe that saved my from a serious problem because my face got frozen but I was so focused on taking pictures that I didn´t realize it. At home I looked like I have a massive sunburn. It took a couple of hours to get back to a normal skin tone. Next time I will put some fat cream on my face to protect it.

While I wasn´t lucky with the lynx and the peguins I had a lot of luck with the other animals: the lynx walked around in his very large run and the penguins stayed in the water. But I got kormorants, pelicans, a babary macaque, even the pandas and last but not least this bison. I have chosen this image because I really love the expression of this old bull. He just lied in the snow and watched the little funny animal outside that moved some long sticks around. It´s obvious that he wasn´t impressed by the weather. I guess he suffers more on a hot summer day. But it would be rather boring to take an image of a bison on a hot summer day. The snow in his fur really makes the image. I have printed this image at 13x19 ( A3+ ) and it just looks amazing.

settings: M-Mode, 1/800@f4, 400 ASA, Auto-WB