Kota Kinabalu Wetland Ramsar Site. Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, 2 May 2019.

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In the late afternoon, we visited the Kota Kinabalu Wetland Ramsar Site, within the city.  I had requested this and I thought we might see a different kind of wildlife from in the rainforests and it would be a good test of my equipment and technique.

Photographic technobabble alert:

I’ve mainly been shooting Fuji in the last couple of years but I decided to take Nikon this time. I decided to get a D850 to go with my 300 f2.8 and I discovered my 1.4x teleconverter had died but managed to get it replaced just before I left thanks to prompt action by Nikon Australia.  Buying a Fuji 200mm f2 and two X-T3s as an alternative was too expensive at the time, and the Nikon option offered better autofocus and greater room to crop if necessary.  I could have taken my Fuji 100-400m but that is weaker at the long end and loses about a stop in light sensitivity, critical in the often dark rainforest.

It was low tide when we reached the wetlands, connected to the sea by a tidal estuary.

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Crab on the mudflats.

The first image is an illustration of the hazards of low light shooting.  It is at 1/200sec, f4 @ 18,000 ISO, and is an 84% crop!  So it was dark and the crab was some distance away.  The exposure was hand held (though leaning on the hand rail) because there was no point getting out the tripod on a raised wooden walkway with people on it.  It’s not suitable for printing at any size but the wonder is that there is anything there to see at all.

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Mud crab with eyes on stalks.  It must hide beneath the water and mud with only eyes above, waiting for prey.

This one’s not so extreme at 1/200sec, f4 @ 2,800 ISO, but it is also an 84% crop .

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Dragonfly on a dead tree, some distance away.

This one is a more respectable exposure, being 1/100sec f4.5 @280 ISO and not cropped much at all.

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Eastern Great Egret.

I discovered that the calibration for my 300mm lens plus 1.4 teleconverter was significantly out so I did a makeshift calibration focusing on the details of a patch of mud.  Having done that, this image is now sharp.  It is on a tripod from inside a large hide.  It would have been better without the tree or pole but there were too many people for me to be able to move around.

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There were I think four or five egrets there.

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After a while they all flew off.

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Walking back now, it is a mangrove zone.

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… with lots of visible roots.

(This was taken with a Fuji X100s, so a wide angle.  All other images were with Nikon D850 + 300mm f2.8 + 1.4xTC, so a long telephoto).

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… and finally, a flower near the Visitors’ Centre..

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