FAUNAGRAPHIC - First Day

With a name like that you would have expected I'd gotten the pun earlier. Only after a night out filming and photographing leaf-tailed geckos and about two hours in total of driving did somebody say it outright and did my ears prick and did my cheeks turn a bright shade of red and did I think of sickeningly affluent, endless photos of camera gear laid out neatly in gorgeous lighting on a petal-strewn bed.

Faunagraphic is a photography and tours company run by Matt Wright, a Gold Coast local and general SEQ wildlife expert. We were filming for an upcoming documentary short, focussing on the wildlife that his tours seek out, as something of an advertisement for his company.

The Southern Leaf-tailed Gecko is a mimic, a forest-culture-and-aesthetic parasite with hardly an original thought in its reptil(e) lentil-sized brain (but luckily it's a pretty one). It was our main quarry for the start of the evening. We started from Coomera and headed up the road to Mt Tambourine to a common short walk that provides reliable gecko sightings. These 20cm living pieces of tree graffiti pretend they're not there until an insect, which for a reptile is kind of what a mouse is to us, walks past it, at which point it launches its tongue at it with no regard for hygiene or the threat posed upon it by a potential reptilian Black Plague. 10 minutes is usually enough to reveal multiple of these fascinatingly pathologically callous poikilotherms.

In this case, 10 minutes was indeed enough to reveal said multiple. The fact that they remain stationary is both sensational and frustrating for a wildlife filmmaker or photographer. Frankly for stills, it's largely just handy, especially seeing as you tend to be able to turn up multiple of the animals, so diversity is normally relatively achievable. For filmmaking, however, you have to get creative. But the advantage then of their stillness is that they allow you to go that far. They force you to, but they also are patient enough to let you figure out what a good or different approach is going to take. In this case, it's a 3D multi-image slideshow (See link). Overall, they're pretty good guys.

For film, I set up a slider a metre or so from the first we saw and tried a few different types of shots. It's a fact worth knowing in life that you can avoid the 7-year-old, parentally-entitled, long-socked, bang-fringed, blue-dyed, red-headed, hyphen-ated, budding filmmaker favourite that is the focus pull, quite easily. Sliding the camera forward until the animal comes into focus can nicely show their capacity for camouflage, although the fact that the shot starts out of focus means the idea has its drawbacks.

Alternatively, you can look around and see what else you can infuse into your shot ideas, such as the dark. If you pan (or slide) from the animal to fill the frame with the unilluminated, undereducated background, you can pan from said urchin of a backdrop onto another subject in the next shot. Stitch the two together and you get what looks like a pretty smooth transition and an alarmingly close pair of animal subjects. You also get a guilty conscience for having lied to your audience, so everyone wins.

Other species detected that night were the Sooty Owl (heard only) and the Short-eared Brushtail Possum (see photo below). Short-eared Brushtail Possums are highland relatives of the Common Brushtail Possum, and won't wake you up by chewing at your window-sill from inside your wall in the morning, unless you live in the highlands and your wall is about a three metres thick and furnished on the inside. On second thoughts the chewing sound that woke me up was probably just rats or termites or my involuntary telepathy playing up again, given the cardboard box that I live in probably has walls slightly too thin to house essentially a fully-grown pouched racoon.

Overall it was an exciting first expedition, if a brief one. Since I was 14 years old I've wanted to be making wildlife films, and this constitutes the first gig I've gotten to that regard, outside of self-appointed opportunities. I'd also never seen the Southern Leaf-tailed Gecko before this night, and any night with a lifer is a good night by me.

#Photography #nature #art #bird