With the Last Place on Earth stuff, we tried to catch a mood, a surrealism, a darkness. But when you’re talking about technique, it’s just tough. It’s really dark, and everything is tinted green because that’s your color palette. I’ve never done it, but I actually think it’d be a good idea to put a little bit of a magenta filter on the camera if you’re in an all-green environment, just like you’d do in fluorescent light. It’s dark, but high speed film isn’t the solution because it doesn’t give you good colors and tightness. I think working with 100 speed is what you’ve got to do, so mixing flash with available light is very important. Of course, if you have a scene with a lot of foliage, the flash is going to hit all that foliage and overexpose it.
There’s no photography in the rainforest that I know of where the animals are like they are in the Serengeti. All the animals are skittish, because they live in a confined environment. Animals in savannahs are easier to photograph because it’s an open environment and they can see for miles. That’s why zoos have such a hard time keeping rainforest animals alive, especially wild-born ones. They die of stress because they can’t handle all the people looking at them.
That’s kind of the bummer of it — I would love to just wander around the rainforest and shoot cool things that I see. Instead, it’s mostly going to places the animals go to, and then hiding and waiting or using camera traps, and I build a project over a lot of hard work. I have to make a lot of my chances by sitting there and waiting, and I may get 5 minutes in a day to shoot.
In the jungle, taking care of myself and my equipment is as much of what I do as anything else. There are incredible humidity problems. Every night I put my equipment in dry boxes with silica gel. Everything I carry is waterproof. We call it rainforest, so you should photograph in the rain. I always have a big golfing umbrella — which you wouldn’t think is what you need, but raincoats and ponchos don’t keep water off your camera. That’s another reason why Canon has been so good for me: their new cameras are practically waterproof. EWA makes good camera raincoats, which are much easier to use than waterproof bags because your hand can still fit under there and you can change film. I sleep in tents that are all mosquito netting. I don’t put the fly over them; I usually try to find a native shelter that lets the air circulate better.
Because I spend such long times in the rainforest, I don’t take malaria pills all the time, only when I get malaria. I take a medical kit, and I have to fight infections as soon as I get them. The best way to avoid malaria is not getting bitten, so I wear long sleeves. Of course, the time of the day when malaria-carrying mosquitoes are biting most also happens to be the magic hour for photographers, just before dusk. So at 4 in the afternoon, before the mosquitoes are awake, I’ll stop and put repellent on, because I’m going to be too busy when they wake up and start biting. I try not to do that in full view of the locals, because I don’t want them to think I’m trying to change myself for the environment.
