rhoskynsphoto

[rhoskynsphoto]

I recently returned from my second trip to Madagascar. It felt good to be back after spending six months there in 2015. Memories came flooding back and it didn’t take long to get back into the swing of Malagasy life.

Unfortunately this was a much shorter visit with the primary objective of shooting footage for my final film project as part of the MA in Wildlife Filmmaking at UWE.

I had planned the film based on the visit to Anja I wrote about in this blog post. Having got amazing images in just a couple of hours I knew that this would be an incredible location for a film, offering a relatively easy opportunity to get some great wildlife footage in a stunning location. Despite how cool the location and wildlife is the thing that convinced me that this was the place was the story of the reserve itself.

Even though it’s a great story, much of my planning before leaving was thinking about how to make the story into an interesting film. Conservation films are notoriously difficult to make as they can often leave the viewer feeling despondent or be too informational and not particularly interesting to watch for the average person.

The story of Anja is a positive one which means I have the chance to make an uplifting and inspiring film. The edit is still a work in progress so you will have to wait and see if I have achieved these high aims!

The shoot went well and it was amazing to be camping right on the edge of the forest, waking up to the sounds of the lemurs calling with the light starting to hit the cliffs that provide Anja’s epic backdrop.

Our guides were great and it was good to spend a good length of time in the location getting to know them and improving my Malagasy. Our cook kept us well fed with a selection of Malagasy dishes served with Malagasy sized portions of rice!

I didn’t have too much time for photos, it’s really difficult to manage shooting both stills and video simultaneously as it is a different mindset required for each, and for this trip filming was my priority! I did manage to get some images though and some were taken by my course mate, Ross who accompanied me on the shoot. Hopefully these give you a sense of what the shoot was like, enjoy!

And here’s a couple of quick clips:

Return to Anja I recently returned from my second trip to Madagascar. It felt good to be back after spending six months there in 2015.

[rhoskynsphoto]

Fianarantsoa Cote Est - Fianarantsoa to Manakara in 18 hours

Fianarantsoa Cote Est – Fianarantsoa to Manakara in 18 hours

Fianarantsoa station at 6:15am.

The queue for the “second class” carriage.

We had heard a lot of conflicting things about the Fianarantsoa Cote Est (FCE), the train that runs from Fianarantsoa in the central highlands down to the Indian ocean at Manakara. Reports of the journey time ranged from 8 to 35 hours with some people claiming that it was the best experience they had had travelling around…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Ambodivoangy village: People and Conservation

Ambodivoangy - Conservation From A People Perspective

Our porters carrying bags of food on the 3 hour hike.

View across rice paddies to a village en route.

A week ago I tagged along on an expedition with the health team and two medical students from stony brook medical school to see the other side of the work done at Centre Valbio. We visited a small remote village about three hours walk from the road, situated right on the edge of the national park…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Meerkats, Pups and a Puff Adder – a story from the Kalahari

[rhoskynsphoto]

Milne-Edward's Sifaka

Recently I have been spending a lot of time going out with the Sifaka team recording the behaviour of the Milne-Edwards Sifaka (Propithecus edwarsi). These Sifakas are the largest lemurs found in Ranomafana National Park (RNP) and have been continuously studied here since 1987.

Formerly considered a subspecies of the Diademed Sifaka (Propithecus diadema) P. edwarsiis now considered a full…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Anja Reserve: finding an icon of Madagascar

Anja Reserve: searching for the icons of Madagascar

Last weekend we visited Anja Community Reserve. This is a tiny reserve of only 30 hectares but it is the closest place to Ranomafana to see the icon of Madagascar, the Ring-Tailed Lemur. Despite its tiny size Anja is home to over 300 Ring-Tails which are well habituated to tourists. As a private community reserve all entrance fees are put towards local development projects.

After arriving and…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Mad dog Initiative– Part 2: Clinic and Camera Traps

Mad dog Initiative– Part 2: Clinic and Camera Traps

Every year a team of biologists, vets and volunteers from the Mad Dog Initiativevisit Madagascar in order to set up a clinic to carry out spay/neuter surgeries and vaccinations whilst also setting up camera traps to monitor dogs entering the forest as well as surveying native wildlife. I spent some time with the team observing them as they carried out their work. It was incredible to see the…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Mad dog Initiative– Part 1: Dogs

Attitudes towards dogs in Madagascar are not the same as in most developed countries. Although a lot dogs are owned to some degree they are generally not kept as pets in the western sense. Many are kept for protection against thieves or to protect livestock however these are generally free-ranging or feral although the distinction between owned and feral dogs is often blurred.

Dogs are a big…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Poison Frogs and Convergent Evolution

Mantella baroni, common names include: Baron’s Mantella, Painted Mantella, Harlequin Mantella, Variegated Mantella

Although it is late in the season for finding Mantella frogs in Ranomafana, after a couple of hours of searching we found one. I say we but the hard work was all down to my guide Lova who knew exactly where to look. Mantella, even though brightly coloured, are hard to find as they…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Frog Diversity in Ranomafana

Frogs of Ranomafana

Boophis madagascariensis

In the past couple of weeks I have been going out photographing one of my favorite subjects, frogs! Ranomafana has one of the highest amphibian diversities of any national park in the country with only Andasibe offering any competition. Of the 300+ described species of frog in Madagascar all except two are endemic and at least 120 of those have been found in Ranomafana…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Lemurs of Kianjavato

Lemurs

A few images of four of the Lemur species  I regularly encountered whilst in Kianjavato that I never got round to posting. Looking forward to getting some images of the Milne-Edwards Sifaka and Golden Bamboo Lemurs in Ranomafana NP although this might be more of a challenge as finding them could be a bit more difficult.

Enjoy!

http://www.robinhoskyns.co.uk

Eulemur Rufifrons – Red-Fronted Brown…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Ranomafana National Park

Having left Kianjavato I am now based in Ranomafana which is right next to the national park.

Ranomafana National Park (RNP) was first set up as a biodiversity and development project in 1986 but only fully protected in 1991 after several years intensive selective logging for valuable hardwood trees. RNP is a particularly popular destination for ecotourists with an estimated 100,000 or more…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Morocco - Coast and Street

Morocco – Coast and Street

This isn’t my usual type of post considering the title of this blog however keeping in with my resolution to write more and show more images I thought I’d share some. I really enjoyed having a go at a different style of photography which took me a little out of my comfort zone and I’m quite pleased with the results. More images than I’d usually post but hopefully they’re varied enough to keep you…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Mountain Hares in Scotland

I’m back from Morocco after a week of surfing and exploring Marrakech. Panic is starting to kick in about how little time we have left to organise things for Madagascar in a months time. I plan to get up a couple of blog posts about Madagascar preparations and what I’m taking, as I did for the Kalahari but for now I’ll share some of the images of Mountain Hares taken whilst I was in Scotland a…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Morning at Bradgate Park

I have been neglecting this blog a little in the past few months however one of my resolutions for next year is to write more and show more pictures. Whether or not this will actually occur will be decided on the reliability of the internet connection in Madagascar where I’ll be spending the first half of 2015.

Here are some images from a trip to Bradgate Park last weekend. The first time I’ve…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Meerkats, Pups and a Puff Adder - a story from the Kalahari

Meerkats, Pups and a Puff Adder – a story from the Kalahari

  Whilst sorting out my Kalahari photos (still an ongoing process!) I came across this sequence of images from one morning that I had half forgotten about. Looking back it was up there with the top wildlife experiences that year among the many that were had. I think it sums up a lot about Meerkats and would definitely have been worthy of a Meerkat Manor episode!

The morning started as every other…

[rhoskynsphoto]

Black and White Dragons

Black and White Dragons

  A recently emerged Dragonfly opens it’s wings for the first time. It will never close them again.

In the last few months I have mainly been photographing Dragonflies and at some point I started thinking about getting good B&W images as something a bit different to the standard colour images. I love making B&W images because you can really push the editing and manipulate the image in a way that…