Great Cumbrae & Millport (Firth of Clyde)

The island of Great Cumbrae sits in the Firth of Clyde, approximately a 10 minute ferry ride from the seaside resort town of Largs on the mainland. Considering it is only about a 40-minute drive from Glasgow and given the proximity of large towns and ferry ports such as Greenock, Gourock and Ardrossan (not to mention Hunterston power stations!), a great part of the island's charm is that it still manages to feel as though it's miles away in the heart of the Scottish countryside. In addition, the island and its surrounding waters are a great place to see a huge variety of coastal marine wildlife from seabirds to seals.

Location of Great Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde

Millport & the South of the Island

Students working on Kames Bay

In the town of Millport are two large sandy bays (Kames bay and Fintry Bay) which are popular spots for dog walkers and horse riders, which doesn't always make them most peaceful spots for wildlife watching. But, if it's quiet, it can be a decent place to look for waders and you'll get some beautiful views south towards Ailsa Craig if the weather's nice. From the harbour you can also get some cool views of the seal colony if you have your binoculars with you (or a long lens).

Rocky pools along the coast are great places to play around with your camera and find some cool marine life in the process!

Rocky beaches dominate the rest of the coast which are brilliant for rockpooling (particularly at White Bay in the north of the island).

Blue-rayed limpets can be found on the underside of kelp fronds if you look at low tide.

The marine life here is quite typical for a Scottish rocky shore, and all the usual species of green and brown seaweeds, limpets, barnacles, winkles, mussels and beadlet anemones can be found readily in the pools. Blue-rayed limpets are also commonly found on Kelp fronds in the sublittoral zone (only accessible at low tide). If you have a net and fancy a bit of pool-dipping, you can also often small crustaceans (e.g. shrimp and amphipods) and occasionally small fish in many of the rockpools here. There is an easy circular path around Farland point which makes it suitable for most people, though it can get a bit muddy.

Coastal birds and Seabirds

There are a huge variety of coastal birds and seabirds around Great Cumbrae, which a quick trip around the island will prove! Eider ducks are common around the entire coast, and can regularly be seen diving for food, or calling to each other in large groups, though I've never been particularly successful at approaching them on the island. For that, I tend to find that fishing harbours are a better place to photograph them, but you never know your luck.

A curlew on the shore.

Bar-tailed godwits foraging on the shore.

Oystercatchers on Cumbrae.

Oystercatchers and curlews are also extremely common, and can often be seen in large groups, either resting or feeding at the beaches, along with shags and cormorants, lapwings, and various waders such as turnstones, dunlin and redshanks.

Gulls on the shore.

A cormorant in flight.

I have generally seen these species most often along the western side of the island and the bays in the north, although I would expect them to be seen around most of the coast. In the north and north-west of the island there are also several Swan (or Chinese) geese, which are a domestic species and are not native to Scotland. Around the town of Millport itself, it is not uncommon to spot red-breasted mergansers, as well as all the usual gulls you would expect to find in a seaside town!

Gannets can be commonly seen out in the Clyde channel.

Several species of seabird also live on the island, including a small colony of Fulmars which live on the cliffs in the south of the island. Kittiwakes and gannets can also commonly be seen further out at sea. There is a large gannet colony at Ailsa Craig, south of the Firth of Clyde, and the waters around Millport are a popular feeding area for these birds in the summer (particularly when the fishing boats are working).

Marine Mammals and Basking Sharks

Porpoise feeding between the islands of Great and Little Cumbrae.

The Firth of Clyde is home to a large number of marine mammals, including large groups of harbour porpoise, common dolphins and common dolphins. Minke whales can also be seen in this area. In the past, there have also been sightings of Killer whales (Orca), a Risso's Dophin, and even a humpback whale! Sightings of these species are incredibly rare however, and are certainly the exception rather than the norm. Nonetheless, taking a pair of binoculars out to the coast with you could certainly be worthwhile. 

Grey seals hauled out opposite Millport harbour.

Around the coast of Great Cumbrae, it is quite common to spot common and grey seals. There's a small haul-out area for grey seals just opposite the main harbour in Millport, and if you have a pair of binoculars you should be able to spot them there quite easily.

The waters around Great Cumbrae are famous for basking sharks, not least because this was until very recently, the home of the last basking shark fishery in the UK. In 2005, the Firth of Clyde had the second highest sightings rate for basking sharks in Scotland (after the Minches).
To see more photographs like the ones in this article, have a look at the Seabirds, Coastal Wildlife and Marine Mammals galleries.

Science, Photography and Freebies!

To say that the last few weeks have been busy is probably the most ridiculous understatement. The PhD has hit crunch time and I'm working more or less flat-out to have 3(!) presentations prepared for the Deep-Sea Fish Symposium being held at Glasgow University in 2 weeks time all of which are on data which is still being processed.

Unless the fire spreads to my hard drives I don't care and I'm not leaving my desk!

On top of that I've been helping out at the Glasgow Science Festival as a photographer at some of their events which has been brilliant fun, but also a MASSIVE learning curve for me (you'd never know how many strange faces people make when they're talking until you try to photograph them doing it!). I think I was getting the hang of it by the end though!

Helen Arney performing in the Admiral Bar, Glasgow

Happily, while the extent of my social interactions with the outside world have dwindled away to almost nothing, you guys have been brilliant at spreading the word about Wild Ocean Photography's Facebook page and we hit 500 fans on Friday (hooray!!). As a thank-you, I promised to make the four images I entered into the Glasgow Science Festival's 'Dear Green Places' photography competition available to you for free as desktop backgrounds, and I have now got them up on my main webpage for you to download as you like.

My four entries to the GSF competition. Click to enlarge.

The competition was a celebration of Glasgow's green places and asked people to send in images that showed what these places meant to them. For me, a big part of what I love about the city is the amount of wildlife it contains, and the canal is one of my favourite city photo-spots and is where most of the shots were taken. Of course, it's not just the big parks or rivers that are great for wildlife - virtually any green patch is used by something! Outside our house, there's a concrete carpark, a 1m band of hedge and then a 4-lane road. That tiny hedge is where a local family of foxes make their den every year and is exactly where I took the photo of the fox cub which won 'Highly Commended' in the competition, so I'm pretty pleased!

Anyway, without further ado, here's where you can find them:

http://www.wildoceanphotography.com/free-downloads

These links take you through to my main website's download page (where I can host files for downloading MUCH more easily than on here); just click on the resolution you want, then right-click and select 'save image as' and it's all yours!

Some final photos from Sinai

ANNOUNCEMENT: If you haven't already seen, the 2013 Wild Ocean Photography calendars are now available for pre-ordering, but you'll need to get in quick as I will be ordering them from the printers over the weekend (24th Nov). For more information check out the link here: http://www.wildoceanphotography.com/2013-calendars

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I have no idea where all the time has gone, but the last two weeks have flown by! We worked hard while we were out in Egypt, snorkeling or diving twice a day and often finishing up with project work or classes for the students in the evenings, but it was brilliant to get a break from the PhD and work on something completely different for a bit. Now I'm back I'm feeling like I've actually had a holiday for the first time in a long time and I've got a lot of my enthusiasm for diving back again!

Anyway, before I put the Red Sea trip to bed, I've got a few final shots to share with you from the last few days. I mentioned before that my group were studying anemonefish behaviour (looking at whether or not they exhibit selective aggression against particular fish species) and it would be rude to leave without at least one or two shots of the charismatic little beasties!

Anemonefish guarding their anemone from me and my camera 

An anemonefish hiding in a bubble anemone

Two anemonefish protecting their anemone-in-a-tyre territory patch

Spot the scorpionfish...

A goby on a massive coral

A ghost crab we found on the beach after snorkeling

Sadly not everything we saw was awesome. I genuinely thought this plastic bag was a jellyfish until I was a couple of metres away - no harm done to me, but it's worse for sea turtles which eat them (jellyfish are a big part of their diet) and clog up their digestive tracts with the plastic. 

Also, on our penultimate day of the trip, the guys at the iDive dving centre where we were staying took us out for an early morning dive at the 'Canyon' dive site which is one of Dahab's most famous (and popular) dives.

Anthias gathering around a crack in the rocks. 

Fortunately the early start meant we avoided the rush of people who visit it every day and we almost had the place to ourselves. The dive itself involves a shallow swim at about 10m or so across a relatively poor reef (the high diver traffic seems to have degraded the reef quite a lot compared to sites like Gabr el-Bint which we visited on our day off), to a 2m x 2m-ish hole leading straight down into the ground and dropping to around 25m. From there you follow a semi-enclosed canyon (there's light coming down from above, but you couldn't squeeze out that way) down to an exit point at 40m.

Entering the canyon

Descending into the canyon

Looking up to the outside world. Only the bubbles get out that way! 

It's relatively dark and a little spooky, but if you like caves it's a must-see! Unfortunately, being at 40m meant I was suffering somewhat from nitrogen narcosis (and a little bit out of my tree!) which meant most of the photos I took weren't particularly good. Also, although the camera housing is rated to 40m, apparently there isn't much of a depth buffer built in and by the time we were back at 10m there was a small but significant amount of seawater inside and the housing was all fogged up. I'm pretty sure it should be able to cope with the depth it's rated to so I'm not massively impressed with that I must admit. The good news is that the camera at least is fine, but I didn't get many shots from that dive!

Sergeant majors feeding in the surface waters

Finally after all that, it was time to go home and head back to Glasgow feeling exhausted, salty, tanned and pretty damn good! There's nothing like a good break and a bit of summer sun to give you a bit of a boost! But I'm not back for long - next Thursday I'm heading to Wellington, New Zealand to attend and present at the 13th International Deep Sea Biology Symposium which should be awesome, and then I'm spending 10 days or so travelling around the south island a bit (probably. I've not really planned anything yet) and hopefully doing some above-water wildlife photography on the way. If I can blog about it I will, but at the very least I'll get something up when I get back.

Review: Canon 17-40mm F4 L

Well look what arrived in the post today:

Shiny!

Up to now, I've always used the Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 zoom lens to cover this range, and I've been almost completely happy with them. The Tamron's produce excellent images (especially on 1.6 crop sensors), and have an extra f-stop and 10mm at the zoom end over the Canon 17-40mm which I must admit I think I'll miss.

So why did I buy the Canon? Essentially it's because I'm completely sold on Canon's weather-sealing and I'm about to lose the second Tamron in 2 years to salt and/or water and/or mud and/or slime damage so I figured it was time to make a switch. As you will know if you've already read about my photography gear, I give my stuff a pretty hard time. Aside from dragging it around on boats wherever I go, I don't even have a proper camera bag and tend to just shove it all into a rucksack with my lunch if I'm heading out anywhere. I'll use it in rain, seaspray, snow or whatever and I've alarmed more than a few people with the amount of mud and fish scales that have occasionally coated it! The lenses and camera are covered in scrapes and bumps, but not a single bit of it has ever stopped working or failed to produce images as sharp and clear as the day I bought the kit. Except the Tamron. Which is a real shame because like I said, it's a great lens and I'll miss it.

Anyway, my first impressions of the Canon 17-40mm so far are pretty much that it works. I wandered through the main campus at Glasgow University on my way home today and took loads of pictures of wildflowers, architectural shots, a view of Glasgow from the top of the hill, and even a load of shots from a graduation celebration in the main quadrangle, which was great until I got home and the thunder and lightning started and I got too excited... In my haste to try and shoot the storm, I deleted everything off my memory card to make room for the video files and I lost everything I'd shot today. So I don't really have anything very sensible to say about the images as yet, so I'll just show you this frame grab instead!

Lightning strike over Glasgow city, with an Alexander 'Greek' Thompson building in the foreground (which wasn't hit).

The only things I can really say about the lens so far though are that the autofocus is absolutely silent (to the point that I thought I'd switched it off completely) and incredibly fast and the build is nice and light, but feels sturdy. The zoom ring feels a little heavier than I'm used to from my other lenses, but it's not a big deal at all. The one thing I can't quite figure out is the ridiculous lens hood that is supplied with the lens. It's absolutely enormous and converts an otherwise perfectly normal-looking lens into  something that looks more like a giant cartoon flower. Maybe it's just there to make it look more impressive, but I can't imagine it offers that much protection or shading? I'll use it anyway since it can't hurt (except to make it slightly more awkward to squish everything into that rucksack), and since I regularly whack lenses off things it makes more sense to have the lens hood take the impact than the glass. Still, I'm pretty glad I bought a polariser to fit it as well since there doesn't seem to be a lot of front-end protection there.

Normal lens

Enormous flower-thing! 

Anyway, if the weather stops terrifying the dog long enough that we can actually go outside again for more than 30 seconds I'll hopefully have some replacement photos to share with you from this lens over the weekend. If not, the hound will have to be my test subject!

UPDATE!
Ok, so the weather improved over the weekend and although we couldn't head out of the city because we had some friends staying over, I took a wee trip out to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and the Kibble Palace to test the lens out. I'm quite pleased with it! Here are a few test shots, all taken wide open at F4 across the zoom range. None of these have been sharpened, so they're shown here as they were shot:

Koi carp in the Kibble Palace pond. The glass roof is reflected in the water.

A close-up of one of the statues ('Stepping Stones')

As a portrait lens, it's pretty nice at the 40mm end. Kev was angry I made him look at plants.

Close up of a banana leaf

A close up of a red flower. The bokeh is quite nice, though it doesn't give the same separation of subject and background that you can get with wider aperture lenses.

Triffids! ... I mean Venus fly traps and pitcher plants

I'm pretty impressed with this. The sharpness and overall image quality already seem better than I was getting with the Tamron 17-50mm so I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs in more 'real-life' shooting scenarios on the next research cruise. It looks pretty nice as a short portrait lens (at the 40mm end), but the 17mm end shows a fair amount of distortion as you'd expect. It's not as bad as the fisheye, but it's not very flattering!

It's nice to be home!

The first thing I did on return to Glasgow after reminding the dog I still exist. Good times!

Nothing sums up coming home to Scotland quite like a bottle of Irn Bru and a Greggs!

Anyway, as some of you may have noticed I've been using some time over the last few days to update the layout of the blog a little bit and have added in a drop-down menu system. Since I'm not a programmer and this was a task requiring a spot of CSS coding, I turned to the ever-helpful Google to sort it out and would like to acknowledge this guide as the reason I got anything to work at all.

With that done, I've been able to align the blog a bit better to the layout used over at my Wild Ocean Photography site, and intend to use it to set up quick links through to some of the location & equipment guides I have planned. For now though, I've set up a 'Kit Bag' section so now you can find out what gear I use when I'm out photographing, SCUBA diving or boating if you're feeling nosy! 

I've also uploaded the first set of images from the Changing Oceans 2012 research cruise (JC073) to the Marine Science and Conservation gallery over at Wild Ocean Photography so you can go and check those out now too!

Wind, waves and wildlife!

Well, the good weather finally left us and we’ve had a grey and windy day today which has come as a bit of a shock to the system after all the sunshine we’ve been treated to the last week! Still, it’s great news for photographing seabirds though, as they seem to prefer a bit of wind for flying in to help them glide over the waves, or sit in the up draughts alongside our six-storey  ship. I must admit, it’s been great to be outside on the back deck shooting seabirds in flight again! I think the last time I was really able to stop and shoot seabirds was probably back in 2010 when I was working on the fishing boats. I’ve had a few trips in the meantime obviously, but I’ve been mostly shooting coastal birds for a while now and it’s brilliant to be back out with the gannets again.

The mystery of why there are so many birds around has been solved as well and it turns out that they’re all here making the most of the food waste that gets dumped from the kitchens. All our other waste is either recycled or incinerated on board to minimise the environmental impact of the ship while it’s working, so it’s only biodegradable waste that is put over the side. Still, it’s good enough for the fulmars and gulls, though it’s a little strange watching them fight over bits of watermelon

A gull making off with a chip. That’s a good traditional Scottish diet!

A group of fulmars congregating around the food waste

The fulmars are here in one of the largest groups I’ve ever seen around a ship and there are probably at least 100 of them following us around. I love how at home seabirds are in the oceans regardless of what the sea state is like and it’s great watching them shrug off breaking waves and strong winds like it’s nothing at all.

A fulmar splashing through a wave

A group of fulmars looking absolutely unfazed regardless of how tilty they get

And this one was so comfortable it tucked up and went to sleep

For a little while we were also joined by a few gannets which circled the ship for about an hour or so, gliding around the ship and floating in the air by the bows.

A gannet flying below the bows of the ship

More entertainingly, for some reason every time the gannets landed on the sea they would target a fulmar and force them to rush out of the way. I’ve no idea why they were doing this since nothing was feeding at this point, but I don’t know an awful lot about birds so if anyone else has any suggestions I’d love to hear them!

The gannets liked to use the fulmars as landing pads for some reason