First outing with the Canon 7d mark II

I am so late to this party.

Great egret reflections

Snowy egret

I've been using a Canon 7D since around 2010 and it's been a great camera for me as an wildlife-photography enthusiast. I mean, the low-light performance was never great, and the autofocus had a tendency to lose the subject and hunt if the light was flat or your subject was moving too fast to track easily (and the settings only helped so much), but it was a great camera that took far more great photos than it missed and it was more than able to  put up with the years of abuse I treated it to. ...And I treated it pretty badly. That camera has more scrapes, dents, mud and fish scales embedded into it than any electronic device should have, but it still works great. In fact the only repair it ever needed was a screen replacement after I left it on the floor on a fishing boat and accidentally kicked it into a bolt. ...Yeah.

A great grey heron being fluffy

A blue heron in flight

Then I picked up a refurbished Canon 7D mark II in the sales (which is a four-year old model now) and was rapidly brought up to speed on what everyone's been talking about this whole time when they say this is an incredible upgrade. It really is. I've only had this camera out a couple of times so far, so I've not got anything of particular artistic merit to share, but I've managed more than a few photos that simply wouldn't be possible with the original 7D. The 100% viewfinder is a surprisingly helpful improvement over the old 95% which makes it much easier to get everything you want in-frame, the extra focus points are great, and the camera itself feels solid and extremely comfortable to hold. So far though, the story for me is all about the autofocus because once this thing locks onto a target, it just won't let go.

The AF holds on despite distractions in the foreground

This was shot through tall grass from a moving car. The AF locked on and didn't let go, and produced more than enough detail for an record and ID. It's a tri-coloured 

This was shot handheld.

I've had a quick run through the various autofocus settings, but it seems like the facial recognition plus "tennis mode" suit my needs pretty much perfectly. It is waaaaay easier to track birds in flight with the mark II, especially at a distance or when they're hiding out against a busy background, or when your non-birding, unenthisiastic driver doesn't quite stop the car while you're hanging out the window looking for wildlife. I mean, I know that none of those things are likely to combine to produce award-winning photographs any time soon compared to frame-filling portraits with beautifully-blurred backgrounds, but sometimes you just want a cool record shot!

A wood stork in the tall grass

So that's what I've got with it so far! Hopefully I'll have some time to get out a bit more soon and play around with it again, but my work schedule is kind of exploding around my ears so we'll see what happens! 

Florida Alligators

If there's one thing that Florida is famous for (besides oranges and Florida man), it's alligators! You can find them pretty much everywhere in the Everglades, and can be found in city drainage ditches, canals, golf courses and swimming pools, setting up basically anywhere they wherever there's fresh water and food. Fortunately, while American alligators are large, apex predators, they pose no real threat to adult humans, prefering to avoid us and feed on smaller prey like birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians or smaller mammals.

A female alligator, watching us pass.

One of our favourite ways to see alligators is to take an airboat ride out in the Everglades. There are a ton of different operators to choose from, but we tend to go out from the Everglades Safari Park because they offer a good tour and it's relatively close to where we live. They're obviously geared mostly towards alligator sightings, but there are usually plenty of birds to see as well (though that's for another blog!), and you can get some beautiful evening light if you head over there for the late afternoon trips (~ 4pm).

My what shiny teeth you have!

Anyway, without further ado, here are a few of my favourite 'gator photos so far! You can see all of these images (and more) in my website gallery. As usual, you can click on each image to see a larger image.

A one-eyed alligator relaxing on a muddy rise in the Everglades

Reflections

Alligator portrait

Floating and watching

A small female alligator swimming towards us in the evening light

Big Cypress in the Rain

We get a lot of rain in Florida. Usually, it's the type of rain that just dumps out of the sky for a few minutes and then passes, but occassionally we get a day that's just grey and wet for hours and refuses to let up. Kind of like Scotland except, you know, warm.

Little blue heron (adult)

Juvenile little blue heron

A woodpecker

A murder log (American alligator)

 
Still, I've always really liked rainy days for taking wildlife photos. The colours are richer, the days aren't so dazzlingly bright, and the animals all just look that bit more scunnered about everything!

Killdeer crossing

A black vulture

A mockingbird

Possibly a small warbler

These photos are from all the way back in January, and mark the first in a series of batches I'll be posting now I've had some free time to clear a bit of my backlog! I hope you enjoy them. As always, you can click on each image to see a larger version.

A juvenile blue heron.

Surveying the deep Gulf of Mexico

I have the coolest job!

Over the last couple of weeks I've been out at sea on a research cruise in the northern Gulf of Mexico to study the fishes that live in the deep pelagic realm. The pelagic ocean really includes everything above the seafloor and offshore from the coast, but my interest for now is in the animals that live far offshore, at depths down to 1500 m.

Hell, even the coolest alien in cinema was inspired by the deep oceans. This is Phronima in the home it carved from a salp, and it was the inspiration for the xenomorph in Alien movie. 

Every single fish that lives in the open ocean lives in an environment with no hard surfaces at all. For their entire lives, a pelagic fish's experience of the environment is defined in gradients of temperature, light, food and water currents. They live surrounded by the bioluminescent flashes of other animals; they may eventually find a mate, or they may end up as a meal for one of the many fish-eating predators that lie in wait for them in the darkness. Many of the fish that live in the deep-pelagic ocean live short, but fascinating, lives.

I've been working on deep-sea fishes for a while now. My PhD research involved trying to work out how the large deep-sea fish that live across the seafloor are distributed in different places and why. Now, I'm trying to work out where fish live in the deep in the water column and why, using a unique long-term dataset from the northern Gulf of Mexico (check out the DEEPEND website for more info). Of course, species names in a database don't mean a great deal on their own, so going out on this cruise gave me my first chance to put a few fresh faces to some long and hard-to-pronounce names. And there were certainly some memorable faces...

This is a fangtooth. How it got its name is truly one of the world's great mysteries.

Lanternfishes have the ability to produce light on their faces to help them spot prey

A dragonfish with its long, glowing lure for attracting prey and "headlights" on its cheeks for spotting prey

As cool and weird as these animals are, all the work we're doing out here has a serious purpose. Over the last decade or so, deep pelagic research has had a bit of a resurgence. While the deep-pelagic realm is probably one of the least understood anywhere on Earth, the more we learn about it, the more important it seems to be; and sometimes in surprising ways. For example, many deep-pelagic animals (like the lanternfishes for example) migrate to the surface waters every night to feed on microscopic animals (zooplankton), and in doing so, actually move huge quantities of carbon away from the surface ocean (where it could be released to the atmosphere again as carbon dioxide) and into the deep oceans (where it can be stored for up to 1000 years!). Since high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are one of the primary causes of our current global warming problem, it's easy to see how deep-pelagic fishes could be incredibly important animals for us to learn more about.

Many lanternfishes have light-producing organs along their bodies. This fish was still glowing when we brought it on board!

These strange-looking "bristlemouth" fishes (Cyclothone spp.) are the most abundant vertebrates on Earth.

Of course, as with most of the deep sea, we have plenty of questions to ask and not a lot of data to answer them with. This makes the catches we're collecting through DEEPEND all the more valuable and gives us a huge opportunity to start digging into some cool and really fundamental questions (like "what even lives down there and how?" and "why do deep-sea fishes live where they do?"), as well as some really complex ones (like "how will future human activities affect how deep-sea ecosystems work?"). Trying to find sensible answers to these sorts of questions is what I do when I'm back in the office. For now though, I'll leave you with a few more photos of some of the stranger fish we caught!

Barreleye fishes like this one have eyes that can see upwards and sideways at the same time! This is a glasshead barreleye (Rhynchohyalus natalensis).

This is a "Tubeshoulder" fish (Platytroctes apus). These have little tubes on their shoulders that they can use to shoot bioluminescent fluid out of, presumably as a defense mechanism.

A predatory bristlemouth (Sigmops elongatus). They have light organs along their belly for camouflage and a rather impressive set of teeth to eat things with!

Those of you who have been following my Facebook and Twitter will already have had a bit of a sneak preview of the other photos I took while I was out on the ship, but in case you haven't seen them, most of the photographs of the deep-sea animals are now also online on the website in the Deep Sea part of my "Specimen Photography" gallery.

Florida's Burrowing Owls

This weekend we took a trip over to the Brian Piccolo park; a well-manicured park in the middle of Cooper City (FL), which contains a multitude of sports grounds, a velodrome, and cycling tracks. It also contains a whole bunch of Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia) who, safe inside their carefully roped-off burrows, don't seem to give two hoots (yes, I'm hilarious) about passersby with cameras.

I honestly hadn't held out much hope of seeing these birds, but I'm starting to get the idea that wildlife sightings in the US are somewhat more reliable than back home, and an awful lot of the wildlife just doesn't care about random people wandering up to them. So, we had a very successful afternoon with the birds before the sun set! They have fantastically expressive little faces too which makes them brilliant subjects.

Burrowing owls make their homes in old rodent burrows, essentially making it a lazy version of the Atlantic puffin which actually digs its own burrow-nest.

Chilling on one leg

A few of the birds seemed to have the posing down to a fine art:

The all-the-way-over-the-shoulder runway pose.

Blue steel.

 Others had less composure:

OMG!

OMG I HAVE A BEAK!

OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? 

The rest just seemed happy to relax and enjoy the evening:

The Florida Mullet Run

Every autumn a phenomenon called the 'Mullet Run' sweeps up the Florida coast, as millions of finger-size mullet head southwards along the Atlantic coast, following the warmer waters and their food supply of algae. It's quite a sight! As these small fish migrate, they form vast schools in order to avoid their predators, which in turn follow along to feed. If you've ever seen wildlife documentaries of the sardine run in South Africa, this is something similar.

Finger mullet in the harbour. The density of fish was this high everywhere!

Mullet being chased (and eaten) by jacks

This year's mullet run happened to pass my work last week. Overnight, the water in our boat dock became literally packed with mullet, as predatory jacks and pelicans chased them around the seawall at the entrance. Unfortunately, I only had my phone with me to take pictures with, but they at least give you a bit of an idea of just how many fish were all jammed in there together!

By the next day, I had my big camera in work with me, but it was all over and the majority of the fish had moved on (of course!). Hopefully next year!

Snorkelling at John Pennekamp Coral State Park

Well it only took nine months, but we finally sorted ourselves out for long enough to take a snorkelling trip off the Florida Keyes and it was beautiful!

John Pennekamp park at Key Largo

We booked a trip with a tour operator in the John Pennekamp Coral State Park and headed about five miles offshore to the Key Largo Dry Rocks reef where we were treated to an awesome array of fish (as well as a sadly not-photographed 2 m-long nurse shark!) and a beautiful reef of corals and a TON of soft corals (like seafans and black corals).

There were a TON of soft corals forming the reef

The reef at Key Largo Dry Rocks

Seafans everywhere!

Oh aye - Jesus was there too! This is a bronze statue called "Christ of the Abyss" and it sits at around 6 m depth just off the reef. Apparently it was placed there in 1965 and has been gradually accumulating marine life ever since. It's also become a tradition for snorkelers and divers to touch the statue's hands.

Christ of the Abyss at Key Largo Dry Rocks