Nature photography is my passion and I really enjoy visiting the San Diego Wild Animal Park. I’m even a member of the Zoological Society of San Diego. Vanessa thought it would be a neat idea to spend the night at the Wild Animal Park, so for her birthday, I booked us on a Sunday night "Roar & Snore Sleepover" at the zoo. Although I captured a few nice photos during our visit, I wanted to share an overview of what happened on the sleep over as a cautionary tale to other photographers who may be considering booking a Roar & Snore Sleepover.

When I made the reservations, I reviewed a moon phase chart, trying to find a Roar & Snore date featuring a full moon. I reasoned that the light of a full moon would provide us with a little more light to for night photography. It just so happened that one of the full moon weekends was listed as a "Photo Sleepover." That sounded great to me! Imagine my surprise when I discovered the organizers and keepers had no idea about what photographers really want and need when photographing nature at night in a zoo like the Wild Animal Park.

Let me share how it all went wrong. As the sun started to set and the golden hour approached, we were stuck in camp eating a meal of hamburgers and hot dogs instead of taking photos in some really nice light without throngs of visitors blocking our best lines of sight. As darkness continued to approach, the keepers brought out a few small animals providing some "up-close-and-personal time" for the other photographers. Let me just say that my idea of a good time does not include photographing animals held by a keepers wearing khaki shirts and shorts. And did I mention that we were burning daylight?

By the time we set out for the enclosures, dusk was rapidly approaching. As we walked past the Lion Camp, some photographers (me included) wanted to walk over and grab a few photos of the lions. When a few of us started to break away, the guide told us we would return later and that the "enclosure was lit." As we later discovered, that was not the case. By the time we returned to that area of the park, it was completely dark. When it was too late to really photograph the lions with available light, we discovered that there weren’t any lights in the enclosure except for a few faint LEDs in the one small area of the enclosure. I don’t know about other nature photographers, but taking photos of lions in a zoo using on-camera flash in the dark is NOT my idea of a good time.

Since we’d been walking around the park all day, Vanessa and I were pretty exhausted. So instead of continuing, we asked the guide if we could return to the tents. We were ready to get some sleep! That’s when we discovered that we couldn’t separate from the group and that we had to continue! I was more than a little disappointed; however, since we had little choice, we followed the guide toward the main commercial area of the park. You have to visualize this in order to appreciate the next phase of this debacle. All of the souvenir shops and food stands were closed for the night. The only lights were a few dim spotlights and some holiday lights on a few of the trees. The guide suggested that we could spend some time photographing the "cool twinkling lights." Her suggestion was simply ludicrous! And it was everything I could do not to voice my opinion. To my eye, there was nothing worthy of photographing in that area and there certainly weren’t any animals in that area of the park.

Realizing it was a hopeless cause, we made our way over to the Hunte Nairobi Pavilion where an "experienced" photographer was scheduled to give a presentation about photographing zoo wildlife. To protect the innocent, I won’t say who he was, but the photographic examples in his sideshow were mundane at best and not in line with what I expected given the speaker’s impressive resume. I found his presentation equally tedious. Apparently other folks had similar opinions as near the end of the presentation, I saw that over 1/4 of the audience was asleep in their chairs. And I should mention that Vanessa was also sound asleep.

The presentation finally ended and our guide allowed us to trudge back to the tents. We hit the sack and both of us fell asleep immediately. I will give one credit to the park–the accommodations were very comfortable. We had booked one of the Premium tents and it was nice and located right next to the elephant enclosure so the "cool factor" was pretty high for that one part of our stay.

When the next morning arrived, I found a guide and told him that we needed to leave and the park. I expected an argument, but was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t ask us any questions. Just a few minutes later someone arrived in a SUV and she drove us the back way out of the park and to our car.

Although I wondered if we should stay for the morning presentation and walk, given what had happened the night before, I simply didn’t want to hike around the park any longer carrying a heavy camera, lens, and tripod and take the chance of again being presented with poor planning and limited insight into the needs nature photographers.

Although the Roar & Snore might be a great thing for families out for a good time and a novel experience, as a serious photographer, I can’t recommend a Roar & Snore Sleepover at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

Now that I’ve written my longest blog post of all time, here are a few photos I captured during our visit to the park. Most of these were captured before we joined the Roar & Snore group.