Jailed for Life
Taken back in the day before it occurred to people that keeping animals in steel-barred concrete cages was cruel. They say "the leopard never changes its spots", but this leopard would surely have liked to change this spot.
The shot was taken in the Melbourne Zoo in the early 1970s. I distinctly remember a woman to my left trying to taunt and provoke the animal with growling noises and gestures. The beast treated this with noble disdain, its mind seemingly in another far-off world. Perhaps it had picked out other members of the public as more suitable prey...
Had the pupil of the cat's left eye been totally hidden by the bar, the shot would have been much inferior.
The image is an iPhone photograph of a decent 10X8 print, original negative long gone. I quite liked the evidence of uneven fixing in the print, so I left it. The frame filling and the parallelism of the cage bars make me fairly certain that I used my Petri FTE with its F3.5 135mm telephoto lens. I discovered later that the lenses for this camera outperformed other more expensive and famous brands.
Jailed for Life
Taken back in the day before it occurred to people that keeping animals in steel-barred concrete cages was cruel. They say "the leopard never changes its spots", but this leopard would surely have liked to change this spot.
The shot was taken in the Melbourne Zoo in the early 1970s. I distinctly remember a woman to my left trying to taunt and provoke the animal with growling noises and gestures. The beast treated this with noble disdain, its mind seemingly in another far-off world. Perhaps it had picked out other members of the public as more suitable prey...
Had the pupil of the cat's left eye been totally hidden by the bar, the shot would have been much inferior.
The image is an iPhone photograph of a decent 10X8 print, original negative long gone. I quite liked the evidence of uneven fixing in the print, so I left it. The frame filling and the parallelism of the cage bars make me fairly certain that I used my Petri FTE with its F3.5 135mm telephoto lens. I discovered later that the lenses for this camera outperformed other more expensive and famous brands.