IN Rainforests

A home in the middle of the Queensland rainforest was the perfect base for a stunning new nature photography book.

The pupa which hatched on Stanley Breeden’s desk is typical of how close to nature he is. Raising the butterfly from a tiny caterpillar has made it one of the stars of a beautiful new nature photography book.

Alongside his wife Kaisa, all they have to do is open the front door to be right in the middle of the Queensland rainforest. The pair have walked for hours, covering vast tracts of their Queensland property, which they have called home for more than two decades and the neighbouring national park.

Never without cameras on these walks, the couple have brought the images of their backyard together in a recently published book called Rainforest Country: An Intimate Portrait of Australia’s Tropical Rainforest. Combined with elegant and informative writings, the photos take you right to the heart of the rainforest. All that’s missing are the sounds and smells, but they’re easy to imagine when accompanied by page-sized photos.

For Stanley, digital photography opened up a whole new world of colour after a lifetime of shooting film. Never hugely satisfied with the colour spectrum of film photography he almost gave it away until his wife convinced him that using digital would change things.

It did and the results are evident in the book, as the photographs vibrate with life and texture. Whether it’s the perfect camouflage of a frog, the hard blue nuts which litter the canopy floor or the detail in the scales of a lizard, the colour is vibrant and arresting.

“Depending on the subject, it could take half an hour or we might have to come back over many weeks,” Kaisa says. “Sometimes, the subject might just get up and run away. Other times we have to wait for the right season, or just wait until we find something, which is why we worked on this book for about two years.”

The area Stanley and Kaisa photographed in northern Queensland is one of two international biodiversity hotspots in Australia, which are the richest and most threatened reservoirs of plant and animal life on earth. The other is in the south-west of WA where the Breeden’s did their last book.

“The patterns of nature and the sheer variety is something we are really captivated by,” says Kaisa. “For example a lot of flowers are like things from the ocean. We love getting up close to that. We are trying to encourage a renewed vision of nature and a view of it people have never considered before.

“Looking up close, like our photos, is something you can do anywhere, whether it’s a moth, a cricket or a blade of grass. Change your view, have some curiosity and have a close-up look.”

Rainforest Country ($75 RRP) is published by Fremantle Press and available at all good bookstores.