Visiting the pigs at Funtington

Well, on a slightly more cheery Easter Sunday we decided to go and photograph the free range pigs in Funtington. I fancied the challenge of photographing something that isn't commonly photogenic.

For such massive animals they were pretty tricky to get close to and the zoom I'm currently using (Tamron 70-300) doesn't like being used fully zoomed out. Even stopped out to f8 it's a bit of a pickle so we had to wait a little while for the bacon factories to get used to us.

It was worth the wait though, with the wind blowing towards us, some of the piglets felt brave enough to come and have a sniff and allowed me to get a few portraits. It's always a bit tricky to get sharp pictures of small animals that like to run everywhere, but we persevered and a few came out quite well. The picture you can see above I'm really happy with, I don't mind the mud behind and the piglet has a great expression.

The symmetry of this one works well, it's bit of a pity that the wire's in the way because I wanted to try and remove any sense that they're on a farm and really try and get a "free range" picture. The photo below shows more of what I was trying for.

This one was a bit of a brave pig and came right up to us, I did have a frantic scramble for my Sigma 24-70 but that scared them of and it took a long time for them all to come back, by which time I'd put the zoom back on... I managed to get this shot of him and his friends playing follow-my-leader through the grass while they wandered up to us which was very considerate of them.

A few even had a bit of a rumble while we were there, I took a fair few pictures of the pigs taking it outside but only a few showed their faces and there really is nothing attractive about a pig's bottom.