Camera
A nature photography tour of Madagascar, Part 3: Kirindy Forest
In the last two articles in this series, I wrote about my visits to Andasibe National Park, where I photographed lemurs and chameleons, and Tsingy Rouge National Park, where I saw beautiful erosion-formed formations. This time, I’d like to write about my visit to Kirindy Forest.
Kirindy Forest (or Kirindy Private Reserve) is a private nature reserve located in the west of Madagascar. The forest is home to a wide variety of animals, from many species of lemurs to fossas (a very weird-looking predator) to geckos and chameleons. Numerous species of plants and trees are also found in the region, the most famous and iconic of which is the baobab tree.
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Baobab trees under post-sunset glow. The gaps between the trees made it easier to compose without creating overlap.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Canon 70-300mm F4-5.6 |
From a photographic point of view, Kirindy is nothing less than a paradise and was one of my favorite locations on my month-long Madagascar trip. The wildlife is surprisingly easy to find and photograph (with many highly skilled and cheerful guides available on the premises), the baobabs are easy to get to, and there are comfortable accommodation options close by. The only bad thing is the Wi-Fi connection.
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Lemurs are one family of primates Kirindy has no shortage of. There are no less than eight lemur species here, from the tiny Madame Berthe’s Mouse Lemur (the smallest primate in the world, weighing 30 grams) to red-fronted lemurs, sportive lemurs and sifakas. I photographed all of Kirindy’s diurnal species in three days, which shows how easy they are to find with a good guide. As to being easy to photograph, that’s a different story.
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Red-fronted lemur
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
The easiest species to find in Kirindy is the red-fronted lemur. They are small and relatively common, so one could say they’re also the least exciting of the local lemur species, but I found them to be very cute and expressive subjects.
Unfortunately due to massive deforestation and climate change, Madagascar’s lemurs are losing their ability to migrate and access water. Authorities are trying to help them by giving them water. The red-fronted lemurs are, therefore, much less averse to getting close to humans. I really hope this doesn’t hurt them in the long run.
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A red-fronted lemur is feeding in a tree. Its interaction with its environment is what makes this image. These animals are cathemeral, meaning that they are active during the day and at night, especially during the full moon.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
The interestingly named sportive lemurs appear not to be sportive at all. Most of the time, they rest in the trees to digest the plants they have eaten. But during the mating season, male sportive lemurs have been observed to box with each other, which gave them their unusual name.
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This sportive lemur looked like it had one too many drinks the previous night!
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
The crown jewel of Kirindy’s wildlife selection (in my opinion) is the Verreaux’s sifaka, a beautiful, medium-sized lemur. Its thick and silky fur is mostly white, other than dark brown patches on the top of the head, face and arms. Like all sifakas, it has a long tail that it uses as a balance when leaping from tree to tree, where they are capable of making remarkable leaps. Distances of 9–10m (30ft) are not uncommon.
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A Verreaux’s sifaka lemur, beautifully framed between tree branches. Those eyes are to die for!
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, , Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
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As a rule, the better composed the jumping shots I got, the worse the sharpness was on them. These guys are notoriously hard to catch when jumping. Here’s an effort, with the sifaka showing its trademark Superman-style jump.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
Unfortunately, sifakas are very hard to photograph. They tend to stay very high up in the trees, which keeps them both far away and at awkward angles. This forces the photographer to use longer lenses, which becomes surprisingly tiresome when hand-holding the camera. I wanted to shoot at eye level but ended up shooting upward the vast majority of the time. They also just love hopping from tree to tree exactly when a photographer has finally found a good composition.
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This sifaka looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. Note the shooting angle is less than optimal here, due to the height of the tree it was sitting on.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
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As beautiful as they are shy. A lucky eye-level shot.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
My visit to Madagascar was during baby season for lemurs, which was wonderful. I ended up seeing many species carrying very young and impossibly cute baby lemurs, and the sifakas were no different.
Again, the challenge was the distance and their tendency to move around all the time, probably even more so when carrying babies. Unfortunately, about 30% of infants are lost to predators like the fossa, a cat-like mammal, and a smaller number to raptors such as the Madagascar harrier-hawk.
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For the first 6-8 weeks, the infant clings to the mother’s stomach, but for the following 19 weeks, it clings to her back. During my trip, I saw infants up to 8 weeks old. I guess the signature eyes are there from birth!
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
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A lucky closer-range, eye-level shot of a baby sifaka in its mother’s fur.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
I’m not much of a bird photographer, but several beautiful owl species are in Kirindy, and they were relatively easy to find.
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Madagascar scops owl
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
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White-browed owl
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 |
Finally, the Kirindy area was once home to a huge forest of baobabs. Not many remain, but those that are still there are huge and impressive. It was fun photographing a group of baobabs in the late afternoon and early evening, under direct light and during post-sunset glow.
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The more baobabs close together in one location, the harder they are to compose, but if you manage to combine multiple elements into one shot in a satisfying way, then perhaps you’ve achieved something.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Canon 11-24mm |
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Here, I used the gaps between the foreground trees to frame the background trees.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Canon 70-300mm F4-5.6 |
I highly recommend visiting Kirindy Forest if you’re interested in Madagascar’s wildlife. The concentration of fascinating species and relaxed atmosphere are unmatched.
In the next article in this series, I will write about my journey from Tsingy De Bemaraha National Park to Isalo.
Erez Marom is a professional nature photographer, photography guide and traveler based in Israel. You can follow Erez’s work on Instagram and Facebook, and subscribe to his mailing list for updates and to his YouTube channel.
If you’d like to experience and shoot some of the world’s most fascinating landscapes with Erez as your guide, take a look at his unique photography workshops in Madagascar, Greenland, the Lofoten Islands, Namibia and Vietnam.
Erez also offers video tutorials discussing his images and explaining how he achieved them.
More in this Series:
Selected Articles by Erez Marom:
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The Sitina S1
Photo: Wenting Zhang |
Here at DPReview, we love DIY photography projects, and one recently came to our attention that we just had to share.
Boston-based engineer and photographer Wenting Zhang has been experimenting with DIY electronics for over a decade and also loves taking photos, so building his own camera was a natural extension of these interests.
“I initially had the idea of building my own camera during middle school. Back then, I wasn’t allowed to use my parents’ camera and couldn’t afford a real camera. I naively thought it would be possible, and cheaper, if I just built one myself,” Zhang told DPReview. His initial attempt didn’t go well, and he eventually saved enough to buy a used Nikon D90, but the itch to build his own camera stayed. Whenever he saw someone posting about a DIY camera project, he thought, “If other people can pull that off, I should be able to as well.”
Zhang says he started the project in 2017, and it’s not finished yet. “Engineers are usually bad at estimating how long things will take. I am probably particularly bad at that. I expected this project to be challenging, so it would take a bit longer, like probably one year. Turned out my estimation was off,” he says.
He makes clear to point out that this is a hobby project, purely for fun, and that his camera isn’t going to achieve the level of image quality found in commercially available products from established companies. Despite that, his project provides a fascinating look into what’s involved in building a camera from the ground up. What’s more, Zhang has open-sourced his entire project on GitLab for anyone else who might want to build upon it.
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Zhang took this photo with a monochrome version of the Sitina, which uses the same sensor but without the Bayer color filter array.
Photo: Wenting Zhang |
Although CMOS has become the dominant sensor technology in consumer cameras, owing to factors like speed, lower power consumption and cost, Zhang’s camera is built around a 10MP Kodak KAI-11000CM CCD sensor with a global electronic shutter, which he selected for a rather pragmatic reason: it was easy to source. “Most manufacturers (like Sony) aren’t going to just sell a sensor to a random hobbyist, so I have to buy whatever is available on eBay. This 10MP CCD turned out to be available,” he explains.
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Zhang attaches the CCD sensor to his heat sink.
Photo: Wenting Zhang |
The choice of sensor has a useful benefit. As he explains in one of his videos, designing and building a mechanical shutter is complicated and beyond his area of expertise, so his DIY design is based on using an electronic shutter. For similar reasons, he chose to use an LCD screen as a viewfinder rather than a prism-based optical design, resulting in a mirrorless camera.
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Photo captured with the Sitina S1.
Photo: Wenting Zhang |
Zhang wanted his design to be compatible with existing lenses. His mirrorless design, with a short flange distance, provided a great deal of flexibility to adapt different lenses to the camera, and he’s currently using E-mount with active electrical contacts.
And that’s just the start. Zhang also needed to integrate a CCD signal processor with an ADC (analog to digital converter), a CPU, battery, an LCD screen and buttons. He also designed and built his own circuit board with a power-only USB port, flash sync terminal, power button and SD card slot, and create the software and user interface to tie it all together.
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In order to build his camera, Zhang had to design and print his own circuit boards.
Image: Wenting Zhang |
Finally, everything fits inside a 3D-printed enclosure that, to my eye, looks rather attractive.
As for the camera’s name, the Sitina S1? “I simply put the word ‘silicon’ and ‘retina’ together to form the word ‘sitina’. I don’t have any better ideas of naming the camera model, so I simply call it the ‘Sitina S1’, he explains. “But the name may change in the future if I ever have better ideas.”
Zhang was kind enough to share some photos from his DIY ‘for fun’ camera.
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| Photos: Wenting Zhang |
Now that he’s built his own camera, Zhang has an appreciation for how much work goes into the design, development and optimization of a modern consumer camera. “I would imagine it would take an army of designers and engineers of various disciplines to build a modern consumer camera,” he says. “There are so many different components but few ‘off the shelf’ parts.”
“On top of the hardware, we still have layers of software. There’s no standard camera operating system (like Android or Windows) so each vendor is developing its own OS. On top of the OS, you have image processing algorithms where each vendor probably has their own secret sauce for better color, lower noise, etc. I think it’s quite incredible that camera vendors are able to do all these things in-house.”
Zhang is still working to address issues in his current prototype. “I think in another year or two it could reach a state where it can be a useable and useful camera. I do wish to sell the camera either as a kit people can put together or as an assembled machine. Not for profit, but so people can play with it, and my effort on this project won’t go to waste.”
If you’re curious to learn more about how a camera is built, I encourage you to watch both of Zhang’s videos in their entirety as he goes into great detail about the process. And, if you have the technical skills and interest to try this type of DIY project yourself, his open source project could be invaluable. I’ll be the first to admit it goes beyond my level of engineering know-how, but I would be first in line to order a Sitina camera DIY kit if the opportunity arose.
Camera
The Sitina S1: How a determined DIY photographer built his own full-frame camera (and open-sourced the project)
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The Sitina S1
Photo: Wenting Zhang |
Here at DPReview, we love DIY photography projects, and one recently came to our attention that we just had to share.
Boston-based engineer and photographer Wenting Zhang has been experimenting with DIY electronics for over a decade and also loves taking photos, so building his own camera was a natural extension of these interests.
“I initially had the idea of building my own camera during middle school. Back then, I wasn’t allowed to use my parents’ camera and couldn’t afford a real camera. I naively thought it would be possible, and cheaper, if I just built one myself,” Zhang told DPReview. His initial attempt didn’t go well, and he eventually saved enough to buy a used Nikon D90, but the itch to build his own camera stayed. Whenever he saw someone posting about a DIY camera project, he thought, “If other people can pull that off, I should be able to as well.”
Zhang says he started the project in 2017, and it’s not finished yet. “Engineers are usually bad at estimating how long things will take. I am probably particularly bad at that. I expected this project to be challenging, so it would take a bit longer, like probably one year. Turned out my estimation was off,” he says.
He makes clear to point out that this is a hobby project, purely for fun, and that his camera isn’t going to achieve the level of image quality found in commercially available products from established companies. Despite that, his project provides a fascinating look into what’s involved in building a camera from the ground up. What’s more, Zhang has open-sourced his entire project on GitLab for anyone else who might want to build upon it.
|
|
Zhang took this photo with a monochrome version of the Sitina, which uses the same sensor but without the Bayer color filter array.
Photo: Wenting Zhang |
Although CMOS has become the dominant sensor technology in consumer cameras, owing to factors like speed, lower power consumption and cost, Zhang’s camera is built around a 10MP Kodak KAI-11000CM CCD sensor with a global electronic shutter, which he selected for a rather pragmatic reason: it was easy to source. “Most manufacturers (like Sony) aren’t going to just sell a sensor to a random hobbyist, so I have to buy whatever is available on eBay. This 10MP CCD turned out to be available,” he explains.
|
|
Zhang attaches the CCD sensor to his heat sink.
Photo: Wenting Zhang |
The choice of sensor has a useful benefit. As he explains in one of his videos, designing and building a mechanical shutter is complicated and beyond his area of expertise, so his DIY design is based on using an electronic shutter. For similar reasons, he chose to use an LCD screen as a viewfinder rather than a prism-based optical design, resulting in a mirrorless camera.
|
|
Photo captured with the Sitina S1.
Photo: Wenting Zhang |
Zhang wanted his design to be compatible with existing lenses. His mirrorless design, with a short flange distance, provided a great deal of flexibility to adapt different lenses to the camera, and he’s currently using E-mount with active electrical contacts.
And that’s just the start. Zhang also needed to integrate a CCD signal processor with an ADC (analog to digital converter), a CPU, battery, an LCD screen and buttons. He also designed and built his own circuit board with a power-only USB port, flash sync terminal, power button and SD card slot, and create the software and user interface to tie it all together.
|
|
In order to build his camera, Zhang had to design and print his own circuit boards.
Image: Wenting Zhang |
Finally, everything fits inside a 3D-printed enclosure that, to my eye, looks rather attractive.
As for the camera’s name, the Sitina S1? “I simply put the word ‘silicon’ and ‘retina’ together to form the word ‘sitina’. I don’t have any better ideas of naming the camera model, so I simply call it the ‘Sitina S1’, he explains. “But the name may change in the future if I ever have better ideas.”
Zhang was kind enough to share some photos from his DIY ‘for fun’ camera.
|
|
|
|
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| Photos: Wenting Zhang |
Now that he’s built his own camera, Zhang has an appreciation for how much work goes into the design, development and optimization of a modern consumer camera. “I would imagine it would take an army of designers and engineers of various disciplines to build a modern consumer camera,” he says. “There are so many different components but few ‘off the shelf’ parts.”
“On top of the hardware, we still have layers of software. There’s no standard camera operating system (like Android or Windows) so each vendor is developing its own OS. On top of the OS, you have image processing algorithms where each vendor probably has their own secret sauce for better color, lower noise, etc. I think it’s quite incredible that camera vendors are able to do all these things in-house.”
Zhang is still working to address issues in his current prototype. “I think in another year or two it could reach a state where it can be a useable and useful camera. I do wish to sell the camera either as a kit people can put together or as an assembled machine. Not for profit, but so people can play with it, and my effort on this project won’t go to waste.”
If you’re curious to learn more about how a camera is built, I encourage you to watch both of Zhang’s videos in their entirety as he goes into great detail about the process. And, if you have the technical skills and interest to try this type of DIY project yourself, his open source project could be invaluable. I’ll be the first to admit it goes beyond my level of engineering know-how, but I would be first in line to order a Sitina camera DIY kit if the opportunity arose.
Today, Fujifilm announced an upcoming firmware update for the X-H2, X-H2S, and GFX 100S II that’s meant to improve the cameras’ video capabilities.
In a YouTube video, the company says the update will improve the stability of autofocus subject tracking while shooting video. It’s also adding support for Ambient’s wired Lockit timecode synchronization devices and introducing a new F-Log2 C mode, which the company says will provide a much wider color gamut than the traditional F-Log2 that the cameras already had.
| F-Log2 C uses a wider color gamut than the standard F-Log2. |
The company says it’s currently “considering further enhancements” and that people should stay tuned. There’s clearly an appetite for more updates among Fujifilm users: currently, the video’s comment section is essentially wall-to-wall people asking why the update isn’t also coming to the X-T5 and the X-S20, and saying that they’re still hoping for additional improvements to autofocus performance in those cameras’ stills modes as well.
The updates for the X-H2, X-H2S, and GFX 100S II are expected to come out in November. We’ll be sure to let you know when they’re officially released and ready to be installed on your camera.
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