Noah Aboussafy

On day three we went to the Banff Park Museum National Historic Site, basically it’s an old building filled with a bunch of questionably lifelike taxidermy.

Jill particularly liked this display of Warblers.

The building is designed to be lit entirely with natural light as it was built before electricity. I suspect the soot from oil lamps wouldn’t do good things to the taxidermy.

This is one of the fine examples of crap taxidermy. Bears don’t look like that. Maybe the taxidermist had never seen a bear… regardless of the reason, this poor bear’s ears are in the wrong place, it’s hair has been cut, it’s eyes messed up, it’s brow is wrong and the mouth is a train wreck. I suspect the taxidermist took some liberties, and ended up anthropomorphizing the bear and portray it as the dim witted savage he he imagined it to be. Maybe he tried to make the bear look like a depressed and argumentative alcholic bear.

Jill really liked the bats too.

I’wasn’t impressed with Jill asking why she couldn’t zoom… while using a 35mm f/1.8 prime.In retrospect I’m even less impressed that the camera decided to fire the flash. It doesn’t want to go under 1/60s, regardless of the fact that it’s a 35mm lens, and it decided to use f/2.8 and ISO800 instead of using the distance information to determine that f/1.8 would have been fine, and if still too dark it could have gone as high as ISO 1600.