[Leica] A Walk in the Rainforest

[Jayanand Govindaraj]

I have just returned from a trip to Sabah in the Malaysian part of Borneo,
in an organized foray into a tropical rainforest. The area I was in has
been decimated by a century and a half of rapacious logging for hardwood,
supplanted by plantations catering to the human race's insatiable appetite
for, initially, rubber and now, cheap palm oil. Malaysia has, thankfully,
put the brakes on to some extent, but the pillage goes on unchecked in
neighboring Indonesia, which has sovereignty over most of Borneo, where it
is estimated that a million acres of virgin forest are still lost every
year.

The rainforest ecology is a race for the treetops, where you get the sun,
so most life exists 150-200 feet off the ground in the canopy, and very
much like the Amazon ecosystem, the forest floor consists of poor soil and
is relatively lifeless. The great mass of life in these areas are birds and
insects as the lack of nourishing ground level vegetation leads to fewer
mammals. Even there, the two iconic apes of these forests, the Orangutan
and Gibbon are arboreal, and seldom descend to the ground.

All movement through the forests are on foot through fairly undulating
terrain, on wet, slushy trails - after all, what would you expect in a
rainforest but regular rain?This being so, photography turns out to be a
bit of a challenge, balancing a long lens pointed at the canopy a few
hundred feet above you through a cluster of leaves, trying to capture a
fast and constantly moving hornbill,  gibbon or orangutan, while at the
same time, trying not to lose your footing! :-)

This is the background for the first set of the trip, which is to try and
show the smaller pleasures to photograph during walks in the dark and
unbearably humid rainforest! All photographs taken with the Nikon D850 or
Nikon D500 cameras with the AF 300mm f4 or AF 70-200 f4 lens mounted. Most
of the photographs are at relatively high ISO because of the paucity of
light that filters through to the forest floor.

This is the folder containing the set:

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/jayanand/Sabah/Rainforest/

Please see LARGE

Comments and criticism, as ever, welcome.

Cheers
Jayanand