Badlands National Park in South Dakota is one of my favorite places in the US. There’s plenty of wildlife, and also great landscape opportunities pretty much everywhere in the park. This photo was taken late one afternoon just before a rainstorm. The desert sunflowers were in bloom and everywhere along the roadside.
This little red-bellied lemur was very curious and allowed me to get close with a wide angle lens. I was in the town of Tamatave at a zoological park called Ivoloina. In addition to housing captive lemurs, Ivoloina is home to several species of free ranging lemurs that come and go as they please (including the red-bellied).
Flinders Ranges National Park is where the mountains meet the Outback in South Australia. Very rugged and remote country. It also happened to be full of kangaroos. I waited a while for this one, hoping that it would take off in the direction it did and give me a good silhouette shot with the moon.
As anyone who has been to Bosque Del Apache in New Mexico knows, getting shots of sandhill cranes isn’t difficult. With so many cranes, it’s easy to experiment with different exposures/shutter speeds, angles, etc. What I was trying to do with this particular photo was to use a slower shutter speed to capture the blurred movement of the bird in flight.
I photographed this warty chameleon in southern Madagascar at a place called Berenty Reserve. I guess the name comes from the warts on the casque on the top of its head. This was actually the first chameleon that I saw after being in the country for several days. I was getting worried I wouldn’t see any. Fortunately, I was wrong about that as I went on to see more than different species in the next 10 days.
Here’s another black-crested macaques. They’re found only on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia in Tangkoko National Park and they are critically endangered. I went to the island specifically to photograph these monkeys and was able to spent several hours surrounded by them in the forest. This guy seemed a little confused.
The golden brown mouse lemur is highly endangered and I was very lucky to not only see one on this particular night hike, but to have it appear out of the thick forest for just long enough to get a couple of pictures. True to the name, they aren’t much bigger than a mouse, making them one of the smallest primates on the planet. They live in the dry western forests of Madagascar and are strictly nocturnal.
Here’s another shot from Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine. I liked the little guy up on the rock trying to get a look at the action below.
This was the only granular poison dart frog that I saw while in Costa Rica. He’s also known as the green jeans frog. I’ve also photographed the much more common blue jeans frog, which is very similar, only with blue legs. What I like about both of these species is that they are active during the day (most tree frogs are nocturnal) and I can photograph them without a flash. I shot this guy from all angles, and this is a rare exception for a frog where I think I like the back view better than the photos I got from the front.
This bird is called a marbled godwit. I photographed it just north of Monterey at a place called Elkhorn Slough in the town of Moss Landing. The light was perfect that day and I was able to lay face down on the beach, and place the camera on the ground, to get the lowest angle possible — always my favorite way to photograph birds on the ground and other small animals.