Taking pictures in zoos

Zoos are among the best practice fields for trying out

You will find subjects that vary in size, in color, in movement speed in a Zoo. Great place to test your gear.

What is great about photographing in zoos

Variety: There is quite a bit of variety of interesting animals. They come in all sizes (elephant to insects), some move very slow (tortoises) and some are very fast (hummingbirds), they can be shiny, furry/fuzzy, can blend into the environment or stand out. Enclosures could be indoors with more difficult light or outside. All this gives you a great variety of subjects to take pictures of
Good access to subjects: Since the idea in a Zoo is that visitors can see the animals, the enclosures are designed to make them visible, and most will allow different vantage points, which is important for example when you want to position yourself with relation to the sun.
Great subjects: Zoos, by definition, house a collection of interesting animals.

Time: Most objects in a museum are static, they do not move giving you all the time in the world to work on your shots and practice.
Learning: I love to pick a lens for a museum and then look at the exhibits to see what I can capture, this changes sometimes the way you look at the objects. If you carry a macro you will be interested in the smallest details, if you have a wide angle the rooms themselves will be more interesting. No matter what, you will be looking at the exhibits with a different eye.
Variety: There is quite a bit of variety of subjects in a museum so you can try out more and different things in a museum.

What is not so great about photographing in zoos

The light. Museums sometimes have to limit exposure to sunlight and as a result many of them are quite dark, making exposure tricky. You will need to crank up the ISO in most cases, and work with a Speed priority setting that lets you pick a exposure time and adjust other settings around that.
As museum lights are not always the same, getting the white balance correct is also not very easy.
Glass cases: Museums want to protect their pieces, and usually will have many of them behind glass boxes. Glass is transparent, but still an additional non-ideal element in the optical path (you pay so much for a high quality lens and now you have a finger stained, imperfect and thick glass pane in between). And if you come to close, alarms may go off (really embarrassing)
People: well you can not blame them, but will be difficult to get the star attractions all for yourself, especially if you need to fiddle with the controls to get your shot right. You have more time than most, so let people enjoy the museum, you can practice with other pieces just as well. Once you have mastered the settings, you can come back to get quick snaps.
Static scenes: In some ways it is an advantage, but things in a museum generally do not move so much. If you are trying to practice taking pictures while trying to track your subjects, museums are not a good place to try.

Tips

No flash, learn how to turn off the flash of your camera, most places will not allow you to use a flash, and if you are flashing a glass display case, you will be reflecting most back, it will rarely be what you want.
Of course it depends on the museums you visit, but I usually end up needing a macro to come close to the display cases to reduce the reflections, but I also frequently need something wide 35mm or less to capture rooms or larger exhibits. However, you rarely need something longer than 100mm, so mid-range zooms or even a basic universal zoom (like the Nikon 18-105 for APS-C) works great. You can leave the long lenses and zooms at home.
A higher ISO and a faster exposure is better than a picture that has in theory less noise with lower ISO but is blurred.
See also my pictures from Art museums as well as Technical museums

Gallery

Mask of Sutton Hoo in British Museum, London. This is handheld and through the display case. One interesting bit about taking pictures in museums is that if the object is behind a glass case, you will want to come closer to the glass to reduce the reflections. At this time you will be quite close to the object itself, so being able to focus close is a plus. In most cases a regular zoom would be able to get a similar reproduction ratio but the lens would be further away from the camera which makes it harder to hide the reflections. In this particular case, note that the mask here will fit an average person so is about 20-25cm high, so the reproduction ratio is more like 0.2x which most practical lenses would manage easily.
Gorgeous art by Alejandro AZÓN BALLARÍN on display in Zaragoza Spain, in December 2019. This picture suffers from quite a few different things, and the problem of the white balance is one of them.
Gorgeous art by Alejandro AZÓN BALLARÍN on display in Zaragoza Spain, in December 2019, this time with issues fixed using processing
A robot in a museum in Manchester, UK. It is not moving :)
From a museum in Stockholm Sweden. Statues make very good motives
From a museum in Stockholm Sweden. This is outside in the garden of the museum. Sometimes you are lucky to have a museum with exhibits outdoors, as you have better and more light.
From a museum in Stockholm Sweden. It is so good to have someone that can hold the pose long enough for you to get all the settings right.

These pages are for Amateur Photographers and not really for seasoned photographers and professionals. I have no affiliation or commercial interest with any brand/make. I write from my own experience. I ended up using mainly Nikon, so I am more familiar with this brand than others. See price for notes on pricing as well as photography related links.