We photographed these tiny chameleons in Amber Mountain National Park in the North of Madagascar. The chameleons spend their lives in amongst the leaf litter, where they hunt minuscule insects. When they are disturbed they play dead and resemble a dried leaf… as a result they are also known as “Leaf-mimicking Chameleons”.

Unlike many other chameleons, Brookesias cannot change their colour drastically. Instead, they are limited to a palette of brown, earthy colours which allows them to camouflage themselves perfectly in their environment.

We spent almost a week looking for these chameleons and were never able to spot them on our own. Fortunately, our guide, having worked in the park for around 20 years, was well practiced in the art of spotting them and seemed to be able to produce the tiny creatures on demand! His spotting abilities never ceased to amaze us, particularly when it came to leaf tailed geckos!

You might have seen the image above before as we have previously posted it on our facebook page and on flickr. Today it has also been picked up by a number of newspapers. For this picture we wanted to get across a sense of scale so we carefully placed one of the tiny chameleons on Matthew’s thumbnail and used the Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens to photograph it. The image really illustrates how cute these little chameleons are!

If this is your first time here then you can find more of our Madagascar images and blog posts here: Madagascar. You can also follow our photography on facebook, twitter and via our free email newsletter / rss feed.

Lemurs living today can be split into five distinct families:

• Brown Lemurs & Allies – diurnal, stereotypical lemurs such as the ring-tailed lemurs.
• Sifakas, Indri & Wolly Lemurs – diurnal, the largest species of lemur belong to this family.
• Sportive Lemurs – nocturnal, during the day they can be found sleeping in tree hollows.
• Mouse Lemurs & Allies – nocturnal, this family includes the world’s smallest primates.
• Aye-ayes – nocturnal and very elusive.

Brown Lemurs & Allies

These are the stereotypical lemurs and include well-known species such as the ring-tailed lemur. Below are a couple of other species… three goofy-looking brown lemurs on a branch and a malevolent-looking black lemur on a palm frond.

Ring-tailed lemurs are the most ground-dwelling species of lemur. They are highly social and live in family groups consisting of up to 30 animals. In these groups the females are dominant, a trait they share with other lemur species.

August in Madagascar can be rather cold so at this time of year the lemurs need to warm up in the morning… each day, about an hour after sunrise, we would find groups of ring-tailed lemurs emerging from the forest and sunbathing in the open! They were very cute! Below you can see a typical sunbathing lemur; he is facing the sun with his arms outstretched, soaking up the rays!

Sifakas & Indris

This group contains the world’s largest living species of lemur, the Indri (first image below). Indris can weigh up to 9.5kg and can reach up to 1.2m with their legs extended. It is an impressive spectacle watching them leap up to 10m, high up in the tree tops. They have an incredibly loud high-pitched call, which reverberates through the rainforest early in the morning… it is a noise that reminded us of something out of Jurassic Park!

We photographed three species of Sifaka during our trip; Verreaux’s Sifaka (second image above) in the South of Madagascar, Golden Diademed Sifaka (first image below) in the cool highland rainforests of Andisibe-Mantadia and Coquerel’s Sifaka (second image below) in the Northwest. Sifakas are some of our favourite lemurs due to their gentle temperaments, fluffy soft fur and goofy demeanors!

Sifakas are perhaps best known for the way in which they traverse open ground; they stand upright and hop along, holding their arms up for balance. This is illustrated in the picture below (notice the tiny baby holding onto its mother for dear life)!

Sportive Lemurs

Sportive lemurs are medium-sized nocturnal lemurs. They are often found during the day, snoozing in trees. Whenever we came across them, they would stare down at us with a rather startled expression on their faces!

The first image below is a White-footed Sportive Lemur which we found wedged between two prickly euphorbia trunks in the Ifotaka Spiny Forest. He seems remarkably comfortable! We were often amazed at how the lemur’s soft hands allowed them to jump and climb all over some of the spiniest trees we’ve ever seen! The second image below is an Ankarana Sportive Lemur which we found by its hole in the dry deciduous forest of Ankarana National Park.

Mouse Lemurs

Mouse lemurs are strictly nocturnal. From head to tail they are less than 27cm long and weigh as little as 30g, making them the World’s smallest primates. They scamper hyperactively around the forest at night, which makes them a challenging photographic subject!

Mouse lemurs are omnivorous, but we generally observed them being veracious cockroach predators! Below is a Golden-brown Mouse Lemur, one of the smallest species, tucking into a big juicy Madagascar Hissing Cockroach!

The main omission from this post is the bizarre Aye-aye, a unique nocturnal lemur which we didn’t get to see. We’re already itching to return to Madagascar to photograph this and other unusual creatures that we missed. In the meantime, we have added over 200 pictures showing 80+ different animal species to our Madagascar Galleries. We also have a number of “behind the scenes” photographs from Madagascar on our Facebook page… to check them out, click here!

We have just returned from a trip to the Masai Mara in Kenya where we were photographing the annual wildebeest migration. After a rather uneventful morning, we stopped on the banks of the Mara River for a picnic breakfast. It was then that we came across a truly exceptional individual… just as we started to tuck into our breakfast, we looked up and gawked, open-mouthed, as a pink hippopotamus emerged from the river! Hippos are usually dark brown in colour, so this individual was very conspicuous! We dropped our breakfast and reached for our cameras.

The hippo was clearly a young one since it was much smaller than the others in the group. It was also very shy and tended to stick close to its mother. To avoid frightening it off, we used a long 600mm lens to photograph it from a distance. Nevertheless, it only stayed ashore for few minutes before returning to the safety of the river. Thereafter we caught fleeting glimpses of it as it came up to breathe.

Later our guide told us that he had heard rumours from other guides that a pink hippo existed in the Mara, but he had never seen it and had not been told where it lived. We were obviously very fortunate to have stumbled upon it by chance. As we were taking our photographs, we had no idea how rare the animal was, or if it had been photographed by others before us.

On returning to the UK, we set about researching the occurrence of pink hippos and found that there have only been a handful of recorded instances, mainly in Uganda. We could not find any reports of a pink hippo in the Masai Mara.

This hippo is not an albino hippo as it has dark eyes and some pigmented spots on its back. Therefore it is most likely that this is leucistic hippo. The definition of lecuism per Wikipedia is:

“Leucism is a condition characterized by reduced pigmentation in animals and humans. Unlike albinism, it is caused by a reduction in all types of skin pigment, not just melanin.”

Being an animal that is so strikingly different often results in a hard life; these creatures frequently become outcasts, rejected by their conventionally colored peers. In this case however, we were relieved to note that the other hippos seemed to be treating the pink hippo just like any other. Leucistic and albino animals are also easily spotted by predators which greatly reduces their chances of survival. Fortunately, hippos are too big for most predators, and this young hippo’s mother would fiercely protect it if they were ever attacked. Finally, animals without skin pigmentation often suffer from severe sunburn. However, a hippos’ sweat is unique in that it acts as a very effective sunscreen, protecting them from harmful UV radiation… therefore it seems that this pink hippo should be able to survive perfectly well in the wild!

As wildlife photographers, it is always exciting to photograph something a little bit different, and this pink hippo was certainly a first for us! We hope that it goes on to live a full and happy hippo life and that visitors to the Masai Mara can continue to marvel at its fetching pink rump for many years to come!

We will be releasing more images from this trip later in the year. If you would like to be notified when new images are released, please subscribe to our free newsletter via email or RSS. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.

PS. New here? You might also like The Adventures of BeetleCam and our Wildebeest Migration page.

One of the stories that has captured peoples’ attention is the mauling of our beloved Canon EOS 400D by a mischievous lioness. In this post we relive the encounter and release previously unseen images.

Having spotted a pride of lions lazing around under a tree, we decided to pit BeetleCam against Africa’s top predator (yes, thanks for comments, we know this wasn’t a smart idea). True to their nature, the lions quickly spotted the helpless creature blundering towards them and thought it would make a convenient snack. After the slowest chase in history, the bemused lioness caught up with BeetleCam and fastened her jaws around our camera. BeetleCam was hoisted into the air and the lioness ran off into the bush with her prize.

At this point it became clear that this was no ordinary lioness… this was a budding photographer! In the first ever feline photo walk, the talented cat dabbled in landscape photography and self-portraiture.

Unfortunately it wasn’t long before the over-zealous snapper put a canine through the mirror box and the photo walk was prematurely concluded.

The destructive kitty lost interest in the now useless camera and went off in search of something more edible. We swooped in to recover the stricken BeetleCam and our mangled camera. By some miracle the memory card survived and on reviewing the photographs we were surprised to discover that the lioness had a knack for experimental composition and abstract art.

If you are a cat reading this post, please add your images to the Felines on Flickr group pool.

Eiffel Tower

The moon can often add an additional dimension to an otherwise normal photograph. Recently I was visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris when I noticed the moon rising above the city. I moved into a position where I could photograph the Eiffel Tower with the moon behind. I took a bracketed sequence of shots and then combined them as an HDR image so that I could balance out the illuminated tower with the moonlit clouds and the streetlights below.

Lunar Eclipse

On 3rd/4th March 2007, we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time; watching a total lunar eclipse under a clear night sky. We set up our 400mm f/2.8 lens and stacked a 1.4x and a 2x teleconverter to give us a focal length of 1,120mm! Camera shake was amplified at this huge focal length, so to minimise vibrations we used a shutter release cord and set the camera to “mirror lock-up” mode. Mirror lock-up raises the mirror in the camera early and therefore reduces vibrations when the shot is taken (putting your camera into “live view” mode would also achieve this). At this focal length the moon travelled surprisingly fast across the viewfinder so we need a shutter speed of at least 0.6s to get the moon sharp (note that serious astro-photographers would have used a tracking mount to move the camera at the same rate as the Earth’s rotation).

During the height of the eclipse, the moon goes red as the only light reaching it has to travel through the Earth’s atmosphere. The moon also becomes much dimmer so we had to push the camera all the way up to ISO 1600 to capture the phenomenon. You can see the full gallery showing the progression of the lunar eclipse here.

Moon Beam

This is an experimental photograph that we took last year in Botswana. There was a lot of dust in the air so the moon was not very bright. This allowed us to take a long exposure of the moon as it ascended without the shot completely blowing out. The resulting image looks like something out of Independence Day – a beam of light coming from an alien spacecraft!

The southern celestial pole can be located by identifying the Southern Cross constellation and following it down about four and a half cross-lengths. In the Northern Hemisphere, you can find the north celestial pole by pointing your camera at the North Star. You can find out more about locating the celestial poles here.

This is photograph is one of our all-time favourites – it looks fantastic when printed large. If you are interested in buying a print then please get in touch.

I wasn’t expecting to be taking photos any time soon so the only camera gear I have up in London with me is my old 1D Mark II and a 45mm tilt-shift lens… an unusual choice of lens but it did the trick!

Here are just a few pictures to give you an idea of what London looks like at the moment.

#10 Zebra Sunset

#9 Snake River

#8 Cave Beam

#7 Fox in the Garden

#6 Caiman Swamp

#5 Praying Mantis

#4 Kalahari Meerkat

#3 Wading Jaguar

#2 Leopard Cub

#1 Caiman under the Stars

Please visit Jim Goldstein’s blog to see other photographers’ top ten shots of 2008. You can see some more of our photos from 2008 at WillBL.com and MattBL.com.