Jungle portrait

Photographing monkeys and apes is so much like taking pictures of people. The expressions, the eye contact, and even the gestures are so similar to how we act. It would be so intriguing to know what they're thinking. I took this portrait of a mother and baby orangutan in the Indonesian state of Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The wild orangs are attracted to the food left for them, otherwise it would be virtually impossible to get close to them. One of the highlights of my photo tour to Indonesia in August is a three-day encounter with these amazing animals. This time, I'm going to try and capture one of them moving from tree top to tree top. They swing back and forth on a slender tree and use it as a slingshot to catapult themselves to an adjacent tree. It's brilliant, really. I took this image with a 100-400mm Canon zoom, and the settings were 1/400, f/5.6, 6400 ISO. You can tell by the high ISO that the jungle environment was fairly dark. I used Neat Image software to mitigate the noise.