TBT=Animal Portrait Project
Back in the days when San Diego’s Safari Park was the Wild Animal Park, I decided to challenge my photography skills by photographing each animal in the Wild Animal Park. Years later I added San Diego Zoo as another place to photography animals. The point was to take a portrait of the animals without the appearance of cages. Sometimes I couldn’t avoid the cages, therefore some shots you can see the fence, cage or enclosure. I had a membership at the time and I could go to either park whenever I wanted too. I figured I had plenty of time to photograph each animal. Well, at least the ones who didn’t seem to be in a cage.
I took my time, each year renewing my membership and each year forgetting to visit the two parks. The times I did visit the parks, I started to notice that I was slowly getting better, less blurry photos and more interesting angles. Then one day I forgot to renew my membership which included 4 free guest passes. Today’s membership does not include the 4 free guest passes, therefore I decided not to renew it again. Sadly I didn’t finish my Animal Portrait Project.
This orangutan was one of my favorite animals to photography. At the time when I took these photos, there was a young orangutan jumping, swinging and rolling in front of this crowd. Everyone was taking pictures of this young orangutan. Since it was crowded on one corner of the habitat I moved to the opposite side of the habitat to wait patiently for this young orangutan to come my way so I could get an undisturbed photo of him playing. The young orangutan was putting up a show for the crowd so I decided to focus my attention to an older orangutan closer to me who was patiently seeing the young orangutan play.
As I turn my camera to the older orangutan it looked straight at me. I snapped a picture. Then I lowered my camera to check the photos, saw it was ok I aimed that camera towards the older orangutan and snapped another photo. The orangutan figured I was giving him my attention so something surprising happened, the orangutan started to pose for me. When I say pose I mean the orangutan would look straight into my camera pose, wait for a few seconds then change his position, look at me waited and posed again. We did this for a while. I kept on taking photos of this orangutan because he was posing for me only. I know this because other people started to see that the older orangutan was moving within the habitat and wanted to take pictures of him. The orangutan would only look into my camera and ignored the rest. I even overheard someone saying that the orangutan was posing for me. The older orangutan and I shared a connection at that moment. When I came home and viewed the pictures I was happy and sad for this orangutan. I was happy because of the connection we had and the many poses he did for me. I was sad because of the intelligence he showed and awareness of the place he was living in. He will always live inside a “habitat.” I do have to say that without the existence of the Safari Park or San Diego Zoo I would never see these animals in person. Maybe the San Diego Zoo will give me an annual pass to complete my project wishful thinking. This is so far what I have.
Ricardo Breceda is the artist behind these amazing sculptures. His start as an artist was accidental as described in “The Accidental Artist,” by author Diana Lindsay. It was a combination of events that paved the road for Ricardo Breceda to become the “Picasso of Metal.” It all starts with his unfortunate construction accident that leads him to find other means of earning money. He started selling boots to customers; those who could not pay cash would trade. One day a man traded a welding machine for a pair of boots. The welding machine was put aside for a while until Ricardo decided to learn to use it. Around that time Jurassic Park movies were at their peak of popularity. His daughter Lianna one day asked her father for a life size T-Rex for Christmas. With no artistic background or knowledge of welding, Ricardo begin making the T-Rex. With each new sculpture his skills and craftsmanship improved, each sculpture became more life-like. It was only a matter of time before Dennis Avery hired Ricardo to make the amazing sculptures and install them in his property.
hat there was an RV blocking the view of this amazing sculpture. We asked the owners of the RV permission to take pictures of the sculpture while only being a couple feet away from their large vehicle. It was disappointing to see this great sculpture blocked by an RV and I do feel sorry for the owners because they were getting a lot of foot traffic in their campsite.
getting later in the day and more people were arriving to the sculptures. It almost felt like Disneyland, we waited our turn to take pictures with the sculptures. In the morning we took our time playing around with different poses to captures a sense of place in the photos but in the afternoon we started rushing to get to as many sculptures as possible. I started to do a “drive by shooting” which is taking as many photos as possible using the zoom feature in my camera while staying inside the car and driving in very low speed. We didn’t get to all the sculptures I really wanted to see the dinosaurs but the day was getting late and we still had to drive home.
At one point we drove on to the desert floor to get close to the sculptures. That was a very bad idea since the soil was soft and we were not on a high rise vehicle but a sedan. We got suck in the sand, the more my sister pressed on the accelerator the more we sank in. We started to place broken branches underneath the tires from the nearby plants since there were no rocks to create traction. We were only 100 feet away from the main road and the small dead shrub camouflaged our car well from other passing drivers. We called AAA and they were not able to help us because we were to far off from hard surface and it was considered “wilderness.” To make matters worse they said that if they sent a driver it 
would be about 60 minutes. Luckily there was a very nice Samaritan who we fagged down and he stopped to help us. He was very kind and didn’t call us idiots for driving on the desert floor. He immediately told us to remove the branches and said “don’t let anyone see” meaning using the branches. He was skilled and very strong. Within a few minutes the car was out of the sand hole and we gathered the kids and jumped in the car. We thanked him and he advised us to stay near the road and walk to the sculptures. Thank you good Samaritan.
semi jump on th