I had a very enjoyable visit to Peak Wildlife Park near Leek in Staffordshire today (24th September 2025). I had visited once before, about ten months ago and enjoyed it so much I knew I wanted to go back.
On that visit last year I had my first ever sighting of red squirrels. Ok, so they were in captivity but it was still a big thing for me. I’m 57 years old and despite lots of visits to areas of the UK where red squirrels can be seen in the wild, I hadn’t ever seen one until November 2024.
I managed to get one reasonable photo of a red squirrel during today’s visit, they were a bit less visible than during my last visit.
Before I go on to write much about my photography today, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed Peak Wildlife Park. I’m not really a big fan of zoos. I don’t like seeing animals in cages. I know that conditions in many zoos have improved dramatically since my childhood and that many zoos do lots of good work to develop breeding programmes for endangered species etc. But still, I don’t like to see animals in cages. However, at Peak Wildlife Park the animals all seemed to be very well cared for. Additionally, I like the fact that the place is not too big. It’s easy to get around and see everything during one visit, something that is not so easy at larger zoos.
I think that during previous visits to zoos and ‘wildlife parks’ I had often suffered from blurring caused by subject movement due to not having a high enough shutter speed. And the reason my shutter speed was too low was out of fear of using higher ISO. I deliberately went out today telling myself not to worry too much about ISO. As a result I was generally using a shutter speed of 1/1000th, sometimes 1/500th and I didn’t get any motion blur. I was using auto ISO and I have my camera set up with 3 different auto ISO brackets to cater for different lighting levels. All of them have the camera’s native ISO 125 as the lower limit and then I have ISO 800, ISO 1600 and ISO 3200 as the upper limits. I made use of all three settings as lighting conditions changed today.
Yes, there was some visible noise when viewing at 100% on my laptop, but noise reduction in post processing software has improved greatly, and does noise / grain really matter so very much anyway? Have I become too used to that ‘clean’ look of a digital photograph? Maybe it’s too clean?
I’ve been trying to worry less about high ISO during my recent gig photography too. Modern sensors, even APS-C and smaller, are so much better than they used to be. Plus, I think I’d rather see a bit of noise than unwanted motion blur.
I only used one lens today, my 100-400mm which offers a field of view roughly the same as a 150-600mm lens would with a 35mm sensor.
