Slowly, slowly catchy monkey - next time maybe!

A trip to Linton Zoo - south of Cambridge - today with the family allowed me to practise my video skills with my Canon 550D DSLR. Packing my 70-300mm Tamron lens and a lightweight video tripod, I thought that it would be easy to pick off suitable subjects in a confined environment - how wrong could I be? The sleeping Lion didn't present any challenge apart from the unavoidable out of focus wire fence. I particularly enjoyed playing this clip back in HD where it's possible to see the breeze ruffling each hair of the king of the beasts' impressive mane. The gentle Hartmann's Mountain Zebra was also a relatively easy subject, even when it was plodding sedately across its paddock.

The most difficulty that I had was trying to film the antics of a troop of Cotton-top Tamarins. The image grab above is virtually the only frame where I have a shot in focus and with the subject well positioned in the frame. The rest of the footage - which extends to about a minute - consists of a jumble of limbs and out of focus foliage as I try to follow their rapid movements around their enclosure.
If I'd been shooting stills, I would have been proud of the above frame and I would have felt that 'I'd nailed it'! But I'm now shooting video where I have to find ways of following the action, while keeping everything in focus and well exposed. I'm not saying that still photography is easier, but perhaps, hour for hour, the strike rate is higher with still photography.

OK, so how do I give myself the advantage next time? Firstly, I need to create a proper magnifying finder to cover the camera's LCD panel. This would exclude glare from the screen and would enlarge the image slightly, making it much easier to focus manually. Auto focus isn't really an option with video.
Secondly, the Tamron's four times zoom range is handy, but I'm increasingly thinking that a lens with a wider zoom range for some situations would help with the three f's: focus, framing and following the subject. The Tamron's 18-270mm lens would seem ideal, although the exposure would need to be altered drastically because at the maximum zoom the lens lets in a lot less light compared with when it's used at maximum wide-angle: a potential solution with another problem attached.
I think my best footage of the day was of the owls. The Dark-breasted Barn Owl (below) posed for me beautifully - an absolute star.