Proboscis Monkeys

Canon EOS 7D, EF 500mm f/4L IS USM + 1.4x TC @ 700mm, Aperture Priority @ f/8 (1/500 sec), +1/3 EV, ISO 640, Cropped About 5% in Total off the Upper, Lower and RH edges

While the first and last day of my trip to Sabah (Borneo) were on land walking through forested areas, the 3-4 days in between were spent cruising up and down the Kinabatangan River at a place called Sukau. As magical as this experience is, I don't want to give you the impression that we're talking luxury cruise with overhead protection from the sun, deckchairs, and cocktails.

Think more in terms of a smallish wooden boat with an outboard motor sitting low enough in the water for me to easily wash my face in should I so desire, which I never did, as something about seeing Crocs on the banks had me determined to keep every part of me well inside the confines of our comparatively safe floating vessel.

The Kinabatangan River is plenty wide and, while deceptively calm on the surface, has a real powerful current running beneath. For this reason, we'd generally head toward one of a number of tributaries that flow off it, which are much more calm and narrow, allowing one to cruise along in relative stealth mode (our boat also had an electric motor for times like these) affording us the opportunity to get much closer to birds and wildlife without stressing them or scaring them all too quickly off.

Anyhow, on this trip the best sightings we had of Proboscis Monkeys happened to be on the main river, which meant that I was continually having to move around to fire off shots, as it was virtually impossible for the guy steering the boat, good as he was, to keep us from drifting with the current.

Mother Nature was in a compassionate mood though, as She began to lower the sun on the opposite side of the river, which bathed this troop of Proboscis wonderfully golden light, and for all the shots I lost to the movement of the current, I did manage to capture more than a few I'm quiet pleased with, and this is one of those, hope you like it too :^)

Critique and comments always welcome, and thanks in advance :^)

P.S. Although usually I state in the shooting data at the top of my posts what kind of support I used, there'll be a fair number of images from this trip where I won't detail this, for the simple reason that, while in the boat on the main river, I was constantly switching from tripod to handheld, so truth is for many of the main river shots I simply can't remember whether I had support or not.

Chances are for this one I handheld, as I recall experiencing utter frustration with the moving current when trying to line up shots while the lens was mounted on the tripod. BTW, being that the boat was fairly narrow, naturally I was only able to extend the legs to a limited degree, but this was indeed a workable situation while in a sitting position in calmer water more often than not.