[Leica] A Walk in the Rainforest

[Jim Nichols]

Nice work, Jayanand.  The red Dragon Fly is my favorite!

Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA

On 4/23/2018 10:38 PM, Jayanand Govindaraj via LUG wrote:
> 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
>
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