Why Borneo?
The curious thing is that the preliminary announcement of the D5, and my pre-order for one, actually triggered the entire adventure!
Having blindly pre-ordered the D5 (on only Nikon's published specs. and as yet unseen by virtually everyone), I then cruised the Internet (looking for any Nikon D5 pre-release camera testers and hoping to see some examples of their results). And I discovered Ling!
Ling is a very gifted professional photographer from Singapore and a delightful phone conversation with her convinced me to meet her in Borneo and then go on to Singapore after that. I was on the Web within minutes to look for flight schedules.
[I had arranged months before to meet-up with my son and grand-daughter in London in June so it seemed entirely sensible to take a shortcut from New York to London via Dublin, Borneo and Singapore.]
The D5, being heralded as the King of the Night suggested that Jungle-shooting (especially at night) might be a great way to test my new camera and I dreamt of photographing Orang Utans in their native forests and even of photographing a Slow Loris in the dark of night with a fast Nikon.
I was very lucky with the Orang Utans and, although I never found a Slow Loris, I also had extraordinary good fortune in having the chance to photograph other other extremely rare and threatened species which are indigenous only to Borneo in the short week that I spent in Borneo.
Orang Utans: the "Men of the Trees":
Jungle-shooting is very different from shooting in the South African Veldt: you do a lot of walking; and just waiting while hoping to see something move; and then a lot of standing with trigger-finger poised waiting to get the chance of a clear shot through the leaves because 12 fps of a solid barricade of tree leaves is not that useful!
The major obstacles are the Jungle itself because the trees are incredibly tall (often nearly 200 feet high) and thickly leafed and the under-story of bushes and vines is also very dense. Some of the Parashorea malaanonan trees (in the Dipterocarpus family) reach more than 72 m (230 ft.) in the Danum Valley.
This dense growth leads to problematic lighting conditions (either very dim or extremely contrasty patchy light); and also the difficulty of getting close enough to get an unencumbered view of the animals themselves.
Orang Utans, and many of the monkeys as well, prefer to move around high-up in the densest canopy and even a 400mm lens will seldom get you close enough. I was lucky enough to have several great opportunities to take some photographs of wild primates in the forest but these ones give some idea of the conditions with which one has to contend and just how lucky I was to get clear and close-up sightings.
