Day 3

It’s a pack-up-shoot-a-little travel day so we had breakfast, packed all of our gear and headed to the rainforest to search for Indri Indri. It started to drizzle as soon as we entered the park so the trails we slippery. When we found the Indri Indri they were high in the trees so shooting up was next to impossible. You could get three or four shots in before the mist obscured the lens. They don’t call it the rainforest for nothing!

Yesterday’s Indri Indri photos were so good that we soon turned around and tramped back to the bus. On our drive we stopped in a small roadside town and were serenaded by a fine musician playing a valiha, a traditional Malagasy stringed instrument. Our destination is a peninsula between two large lakes. We took a 90 minute boat ride that crossed one lake, waved at fishermen paddling dugout canoes, navigated a long reedy channel and journeyed to the shore of the second lake where our beautiful resort is located.

Tomorrow we hope to photograph lemurs, lemurs and more lemurs. I’m going to relax the night away in my sweet bungalow that sits on a bluff overlooking the lake.

Day 4

I love waking up in paradise! Palmarium Lodge has smooth sand walkways leading through lush tropical gardens on the way to the dining area. Everyone brought camera gear and we found lots to shoot on the grounds. Land snail, tropical flowers, brilliant green and red geckos, and lots of lemurs! Brown lemurs, hybrid lemurs, black and white ruffed lemurs and the rare black lemur (this is what I came for). This was all before breakfast!

The next event was a forest walk that gave us the uncommon black Indri Indri. We were eye to eye with a family of four for an hour! These are wild animals that are not shy of people so we photographed from very close range. It was the most amazing feeling when a young black Indri Indri reached out and held my hand. Soft filtered forest light and a fill flash made for wonderful portraits. My favorite shots were when I could find a tunnel in the forest leaves and shoot from long distance with the 600 mm lens.

Next there was a troop of six hybrid lemurs with their Irish setter colored fur. They followed us down the trail and then disappeared into the forest. Another path led us to a family of Coquerel’s sifaka lemurs that leaped through the trees and danced along the forest trail. This was a morning not to be forgotten.

First up for the afternoon shoot was “Lemur Flight Photography.” The first step is to find two trees about 25 feet apart with a clear background. Next, have some bananas and call the lemurs in from the forest. Once they know there is a free meal available, they are perfectly willing to jump from tree to tree for a small reward. My favorite technique is to focus on the lemur as he perches on a tree. Don’t refocus on him as he jumps to the next tree. Keep your focus in manual. Also, don’t pan with the flight path. If you have a fast enough shutter speed both the forest and the flying lemur will be in focus at 10 frames per second. The last step in this process is to combine the shots from a well captured leap into a single frame to illustrate the lemur’s flight path.

From there we hiked 20 minutes to a bog along the lake shore where there were carnivorous plants, whose brilliant yellow flowers had trapdoors set to capture unwary insects. After an afternoon of macro photography we made our way back to the lodge in the dark with time for dinner and packing for tomorrow’s trip to Tana.

< Previous post | Next post >