KHA

Confess your sins to the warthog, not to me, honey.

I've been meaning to acknowledge newer replies, but I haven't had a chance. But I just quickly want to respond to Starsphinx. You make some good points. But ultimately, we're all souls in bodies here, man. Spirits in the material world, as the Police might say. The elemental rule of life is -- don't do anything to any creature's body that you wouldn't want done to your body. Because you may be gifted that body in the next life. Or perhaps even later in this life, as your body is subject to change in ways and through experiences you might never have imagined when you were young. That's the game, man. When you figure it out, you advance one step further around this seemingly endless board. Gotta run. I have a zoo shoot to plan!

This is a good way to look at it, thanks. I'll have to take a look at that link when I get a chance.

Thanks! I think I have it. Short trip!

This all sounds great, and glad the topic is serving a need! If you want to see more of it, speak up and start those threads! I appreciate your attention to the dignity of animals, and as I photograph more and more of them, I notice a lot of them really eyeing me up, which makes me more conscious of their levels of consciousness. After posting recently in another thread about feeling guilty about a duck family that retreated under a car when I got too close, I had the opposite experience a week or so later, when a duck walked up so close to investigate me (or maybe it was just after food, but it had no interest in the Slurpee I proffered, which is all I had on me!), that I retreated a little a couple times because I thought it might take a nip at me! It just hung out inches from my lens for 20 minutes and let me shoot away, from all angles, and even moved a few feet away when it was time to urinate (or something), which I thought was considerate. I was worried it might be sick because its behavior seemed so extraordinary to me, and I thought it might just be coming up to me to die or something! Alternatively, it also occurred to me that maybe it just loved the spotlight, and walked up to me and my camera for the same reason a lot of humans do!

The place I'm planning to go prohibits commercial photography and tripods without arranging licensing through their media office, but I'm doing editorial. (And yes, I mark my editorial, "Editorial", because I want there to be NO DOUBT!) Perhaps it's those without principled stances who need to fear consequences . . . 🙂 True passion makes you fearless.

Thanks for all your responses. I do think it's a good idea to try to convey emotions (and facts, of course) about this issue through the medium itself, so I will keep that in mind with some of my framing. My previous time shooting the zoo, I specifically tried to find framing that would downplay the zoo aspect. But I feel better now about shooting after hearing the various ways some of you approach it ethically. And for any of you out there who are vegetarians, I just have to mention, in case you haven't heard -- a huge milestone for us has been reached this week: KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN HAS LAUNCHED MEATLESS CHICKEN!! A personal dream come true for me, decades in the waiting. I won't be able to try it until they roll it out across the U.S., but I've been missing that one-of-a-kind KFC Regular, Extra Crispy, and BBQ batter all these years, so I'm excited that even that behemoth of meat has come around!

I wanted to get some opinions from any fellow animal-rights-conscious/vegetarian/etc. photographers out there. I've only done zoo photography once (and never aquarium), many years ago, having since decided I wasn't comfortable shooting (or even visiting) animals kept in what must seem like prisons to a lot of them. However, it occurs to me lately that stock photography of zoos could potentially be used by those campaigning for the rights of animals. Thus, I'm thinking of changing my stance. But I'm wondering if it would be hypocritical to profit off animals in these conditions. And of course, the photos could also be used to promote the business of animal confinement instead of question it. But I do know in some cases zoos do good work to take care of animals that might be in danger otherwise. So I'm trying to weigh all the factors. How do some of you approach this?

Just yell at the skies like Grandpa Simpson till they bend to your will! No — I've learned to appreciate all kinds of skies, and I do my best to work with whatever Mother Nature gives me on the day. (Other than having slowly learned not to waste my time shooting buildings that will have angles too much in shadow in the afternoon of a cloudless, sunny day. Just too much contrast to try to compensate for, even with fill light in Lightroom.) The positives of flat gray or white days can be nice, even light; having subjects or elements of subjects really stand out against the neutral background; and sometimes lending photos a brooding, Impressionist, painterly look. Play the hand you're dealt. And if it's absolutely unplayable, that's just Mother Nature telling you to go home and tend to admin! Now I'm off to spend the day doing admin and clearing off my computer so I can actually upload the 128 Gb cards I seem to be filling every few weeks now . . .

Thanks, Starsphinx. I guess if there's a chance it's a regular outing for them I don't need to feel as bad. And it occurred to me that they have no idea what I'm doing when I'm standing there taking pictures -- she might think I'm just taking my time preparing an attack, and a DSLR aimed at them could look pretty threatening. In general, though, animals seem to trust me, and I feel like maybe they sense my harmlessness as a vegetarian.

It's a coincidence that the topic of disturbing animals has come up, because I was just feeling guilty the other day when I drove into a city parking lot and was surprised to see what I think was a mother duck and her very small ducklings just sitting on the ground basking in the shade provided by a car one space over from me. I didn't want to take the time to put my telephoto lens on because I was afraid they'd disappear before I had a chance, plus I didn't want to draw attention to myself from the people in the area. So at first I rolled down my passenger window, leaned over, and took a few shots with my kit lens; but it was difficult not getting the car interior in the shot. So then since they didn't seem to be moving, I got more courageous and got out of the car and took a few shots. They still looked too distant, so I gingerly moved a little closer. They had been watching me the whole time, so I didn't think they'd feel unsafe; but I guess mama felt I got too close with my last move. She turned her head and communicated with her children, and everyone slowly got up and ambled underneath the car. I felt guilty for having disturbed their chill time just sitting out unprotected, feeling carefree enough to be in the middle of a lot enjoying the beautiful day. And then the whole family had to relocate under a greasy car because of me! I hope they moved back after I left. So now if a similar situation happens I'm going to take a few medium shots with the kit lens, then stop and take the extra time to put on that telephoto!

I can't speak to UK law, but in the US there's no law against asking questions of people with whom you have contracts. And congratulations on your first sale, Virender!

I didn't mean to go this in-depth about my process; I was actually just trying to let the OP know he wasn't alone. But since everyone keeps asking, here's more clarification. Unlike with compound modifiers, I put a space before and after each hyphen to separate words. This helps me keep distinct words separate from multi-word phrases. E.g., "Woman - Women - Girl - Girls" vs. "Woman running through park". Visually, it helps me to have a hyphen separating them rather than a space so it's clear they are separate words rather than a whole phrase describing something. Image Manager doesn't actually import/show the hyphens; it seems to treat them as spaces. It could possibly be an issue, except again, when a tag that had these separating hyphens already removed upon placement into a posted image in the IM and looks fine, but then gets pasted into another image and gets truncated or disappears completely, it does suggest the hyphens were not the issue. Now when I used to put these hyphenated tags into Lightroom, they did frequently break up into individual tags upon import (but not always, puzzlingly) even though I only used commas at the end of the entire tag, along with sometimes disappearing completely, so that's why I stopped putting them into LR before upload. And even ones that didn't have hyphens sometimes broke up; e.g., "Fashion Week New York City February 2019" might become "Fashion", "Week", "New", "York", etc., and since that maxed out 50 tags pretty quickly, there would be tags that evidently got imported but that I couldn't see until I deleted others. So the IM would say I had 50 tags, but then I would delete one and the number wouldn't go down to 49. I would have to delete many, many tags in order to finally see that number change. I have adapted, so it's really not an issue for me. I was just showing solidarity with the OP.

I don't actually use individual words as tags anymore, which is one reason I suspect my issue differs slightly from others'. I tend to max out the character count in each tag by using multiple words separated by hyphens (and separate each tag from another with commas), so it's not an issue with a single word getting truncated; it'll be a word(s) at the end of a series of words. When it's just a matter of having reached the maximum character count of that tag, I can tell, because it automatically goes into the tag list without me hitting enter, and I simply delete the extra word upon reentry. But often, as mentioned, the same word count that doesn't work when it's automatically uploaded, or pasted, works when I enter it directly into the Image Manager. That's why I wondered in my previous post if it was a limitation with the copy/upload function having a smaller character limit than the tag itself. When I've tried to copy and paste a whole series of my complex tags from my text doc at once it just turns into a mess, so that's why I do things in smaller chunks now.

With me it's not as simple as character limits, because as in the example I mentioned with pasting from one image in the Image Manager to another, the number of characters had already been accepted in the original image. I selected all the tags, say 30, and pasted them into another image through the tag entry box. Upon pasting, there were only, say, 22 tags, and some of the ones that were there had been cut off. When I deleted those, and repasted each tag individually it worked fine and there was no problem with the number of characters. Perhaps there's a limit to how many characters can be copied or uploaded that's different from how many characters can exist in the final output.