“Orangutans come to my mind immediately as my personal favourite. It’s been one of my life-long passion projects documenting them, so I would definitely vote for orangutans.

We are one of their closest relatives. We share 97 per cent of our DNA. The only animals that are slightly more closely related to us are chimpanzees and gorillas, so you can definitely see the incredible connection that we have as great apes.

I like the challenge of photographing orangutans. It’s not an easy species to photograph. It requires long days of following them through the forest, climbing trees sometimes and trying to take some unique images. They is so much interesting behaviour that orangutans do, but they don’t do it that often, so it’s really hard to get a good shot of them doing things like building a nest or using a leaf umbrella or mother-infant interactions and so on.

Having spent many years photographing orangutans, I feel that I still have never captured the perfect shot and there is so much more to do.

I kind of lumped orangutans together but there are definitely three distinct species of orangutans: Sumatran, Bornean, Tapanuli. They are all very worthy subjects and they are all endangered.””

www.timlamanfineart.com
savegporangutans.org
www.savewildorangutans.org
www.instagram.com/timlaman

My Big 5

Orangutan
Elephant
Mountain Gorilla
Cheetah
Polar Bears