Whales!

Last night we were joined by a family group of pilot whales just as we were finishing dinner and preparing ourselves for our first night of seafloor sampling. Incidentally, running up and down two flights of stairs to get your camera after eating a large amount of lasagne and banana bread (separately, not at once!) is not an entirely pleasant experience!

A large pod of pilot whales popped by the ship yesterday.

Pilot whales in the waves

Pilot whales are funny beasts. They have a very lazy way of rolling through the water, which makes them a bit difficult to take interesting photographs of because they don't do much other than breathe and pootle about. The calves tend to be a lot more active and tend to leap around a bit more which is VERY cute to see if you can find a family group! 

Photobombing whale

Family of pilot whales

This pod had a couple of calves with them that still had visible foetal bands, meaning they must have been pretty new! We got really lucky with this group, and they stayed near the ship for about two hours. Most of the photos I took were of small black fins in the distance (as is typical of photographing whales and dolphins), but they did briefly come right up close to us and I got a few photos that were a bit more reasonable!

This pilot whale calf was so young the foetal bands were still visible on its flanks.

We've also been seeing a few shearwaters over the past couple of days. I'm not completely sure what species of they are, but I suspect they're Cory's shearwaters, though that's based mostly on the fact that I've seen them out here before and these ones look a bit similar. If anyone with a better internet connection than me can check and let me know it'd be much appreciated!

I think this is a Cory's Shearwater... Is that right?

Anyway, we've been put on night duty for our mud-coring work so I'm going to try and grab a couple of hours of sleep before dinner. See you next time!

Pilot Whales!

So yesterday was a pretty cool day! Sometime just after lunch we got a call from the bridge that there were pilot whales just beside the boat. As usual, there was a mad dash upstairs to try and see them before they disappeared off into the depths again, but it turns out we needn't have worried too much as the group stayed with us for the best part of an hour. 

Whale sightings tend to bring everyone out onto deck!

The species of pilot whale we get in temperate waters is the long-finned pilot whale, Globicephala melas which belongs to the group 'Odontoceti' or 'toothed whales'. Pilot whales are fairly common offshore, and I've seen them on most of the deep-water research cruises I've been on, but they don't tend to be a particularly active species, and they seem to spend a lot of time resting at the surface. It's always cool to see them, but you don't really get very exciting photographs when they're just relaxing! Yesterday we got lucky though and the group not only stayed with us for ages, but they were also actively diving and spy-hopping and also had a lot of very young calves with them. The calves were brilliant to watch as they were noticeably more exuberant and slightly more clumsy than their parents in the water, but also couldn't dive for nearly as long as the adults which helped us keep track of them as they moved around. Because the weather was a little rougher than normal yesterday too it meant that the animals were sticking their heads much further out the water than they usually do to breathe which meant we could get some really clear views of their faces. Anyway, without further ado, here's some of the best ones:

Pilot whale group. You can see from the fin sizes that there are a lot of  young animals present.

Popping up to breathe

All surfacing at once

And, my personal favourite (I am extremely chuffed with this photo, it took a lot of waiting to get it!):

Calf surfacing beside its mother.

The calf in that last photo was still young enough that you could see the foetal bands on its flanks, which are essentially caused by folds in the skin when the calf is still inside the mother's womb. They'll fade over time, but give an indication that this is still a very young animal, probably no more than a few weeks old.

The internet's back on! Time for a blog...

And so, after 4 days of travelling, we finally made it to our sampling stations in the Porcupine Abyssal Plain first thing on Sunday morning ready and excited to start working! ...At least the morning shift were up and ready to go - my afternoon (1500-0300) shift was a little slower to get out of bed, most of us just managing to get ourselves up in time to eat lunch! Still, I can't complain; doing the backshift is DEFINITELY the better option compared to having to get out of bed at 3am every day (I don't do mornings). 

It is quite interesting seeing how different people deal with the shifts though. Most people on board I think would prefer to work the 1500-0300 shift if they had the choice, but some definitely deal it better than others. For me, if I had to get up for 3am I would still wake up feeling like crap no matter when I went to bed, whereas working the backshift until 0300 is absolutely no problem and only took a day or two to get used to. It's also helping the productivity (well, that and the extremely intermittent internet connection means I can't get too distracted too easily!), which always helps ease the PhD Fear back a little bit!

Mud + Science = Fun times for all.

Anyway, aside from settling into our shifts and getting to know everyone else on the ship, we've been getting stuck into a lot of megacoring work, which basically involves sending a corer to the seabed armed with 8-10 plastic tubes, which will be forced into the seabed then mechanically sealed up and hauled all the way back up ready to be measured, cut into slices, preserved and stored. All in all, the whole cycle takes around 7 hours (5 hours to send the gear down and back up and about 2 hours to process) so there's plenty of time to escape off to do some work or watch a film in between cores (or bizarrely, learn how to play cribbage), which is nice because it's not the most exciting work! It's one of those team-effort type jobs though so it's a pretty good laugh at least.

Autosub on the back deck. 

Autosub (our AUV or 'Autonomous Underwater Vehicle') is still being prepared for it's first launch later this afternoon (Wednesday) so keep your fingers crossed that it all goes well! The plan for the next few days is to send it down to take a few test photographs on the seabed so we can make sure it's all working the way it's meant to, and then it will rise up to about 100m off the sea floor and conduct the first part of an acoustic mapping survey which will take about 6 days to complete. So there won't be any fishy photos to look at for a while yet I'm afraid!

A little mystery tern floating by on its own private polystyrene island. Click to enlarge.

In wildlife news, there hasn't been much in the way of bird life out here except for this little mystery tern which floated past the ship yesterday on a little polystyrene island. As usual, I've got very little idea what this is, but it doesn't look like any of the British species I've seen before. Anyone out there got any ideas?

Maybe a fin whale? A group of about 5-6 whales passed our ship yesterday but no-one could tell what species they were.

We also saw a lot of whales yesterday too, which was very exciting! They were pretty far away, but they were pretty big (one was probably >15m, though I'm horrible at estimates. Definitely bigger than a minke though) and we think they might have been fin whales. One day I'll buy an ID guide and be able to say for sure what all these things are that we find out here!

Guide: How to Take Photographs at Sea

Taking your camera out with you on a boat is an excellent way to get up close to marine creatures in their natural environment, but also poses a unique set of challenges both for the photographer and the equipment. As you can probably tell, I’ve spent an awful lot of time working at sea which has given me some amazing opportunities to see and photograph some stunning marine animals in their element. In this short guide, I list my top 5 tips for taking better wildlife photographs while you’re at sea

1.  It’s going to be wet, so prepare your gear before you go

If you’re going out to sea, it’s going to be wet! Even if you manage to get out on a beautiful clear day, with no waves and no rain it’s often much more humid out on the water than on land so make sure you and your equipment is prepared. If your boat doesn’t have a dry area on board, then taking a drybag or waterproof case of some sort is a must so you’ve got somewhere safe and dry to store your gear when you’re not using it (or for when it starts to get wavy and the rain comes on!). If you intend to do a lot of photography at sea, then it’s well worth investing in weather-sealed equipment to avoid the worst of the long-term corrosion that comes with photographing in salt spray, but it’s not something to worry too much about for the occasional trip. I still own a (not weather-sealed) Canon 400D which got completely swamped by a wave once while it was round my neck (it was a case of save myself and soak the camera or fall in the sea) and it’s still working perfectly well now after a bit of a towel dry and some time near a radiator! If you can do, it’s worth trying to make as few lens changes as you can and do them as quick as you can (especially if you’re exposed on deck) to avoid allowing the dampness and salt inside your camera body, but it’s not something that’s worth losing sleep (or good photographs) over unless you’re likely to get rain or spray in there.

It’s also worth mentioning that it is ALWAYS colder at sea than you think it will be, so pack decent waterproofs (jacket and trousers) and warm layers so you can spend as much time outside as possible. A decent pair of walking boots or outdoor shoes are also great for keeping your feet dry and giving you grip on the deck.


2. Manual mode is your friend

Having my camera set to manual (and ready to go) meant that when this whale appeared unexpectedly next to our ship I was ready to get the photograph and didn't need to worry about the camera settings.

With a bit of knowledge about the behaviours of different species, it is possible to predict when the most interesting  shots will happen.

This one’s pretty important since boats are only ever going to provide an unstable platform for shooting from, but there are a few things you can do which will help:

Rough seas and expensive cameras are rarely a good combination...

Leaning against something sturdy will help balance you against the swell.

• Seasickness: Seasickness is probably one of the worst feelings in the world and is said to come in two stages: the first stage, when you’re afraid you’ll die, and the second, when you’re afraid you won’t! There are a LOT of different ways to avoid seasickness, and the ones which work are different for different people. There are a lot of over-the-counter tablets that you can buy (I like Stugeron because I don’t get side effects with it, but other people find it makes them too drowsy), but I think one of the most important things is to make sure you eat before you get on the boat. Having a bit of ballast in your stomach does the world of good and is the one thing I’ve heard a lot of people talk about when we’re at sea for long periods of time – not eating properly is about one of the worst things you can do to yourself! Similarly, make sure you drink plenty of water. Some people (myself included) find ginger can help settle their stomach (in whatever form you prefer – crystallised, tea, biscuits, whatever!), and of course, watching the horizon (or the wildlife) also helps make you feel a bit more steady. And if none of that works, lying down somewhere quiet for a while often helps.
5.Stay Safe
This is absolutely the most important thing. If you fall out of a boat into temperate (e.g. UK) waters, the sea temperature is low enough year-round to kill you from hypothermia pretty quickly (and it will ruin your camera!). At the end of the day, it’s not worth falling in the water for a photograph so use your common sense – wear a life jacket, and if there’s any doubt that you might not be able to keep your balance and shoot, don’t shoot.

The exact settings you apply to your camera are going to vary hugely depending on what you intend to shoot, whether it’s birds in flight, people working on a boat or seascapes for example, but there is one thing that I find enormously useful regardless of the photographic subject and it is setting my camera to full manual mode. I understand that the idea of using manual settings can seem overwhelming initially (it was years before I gave it a try), but once you get used to it, it makes photography at sea far, far easier. Essentially, putting your camera into manual means that you choose the aperture, shutter speed and ISO yourself to produce the exposure you’re looking for. When I started out, I shot exclusively in aperture priority mode, keeping the aperture as wide as possible and usually leaving the ISO around 400 to keep the speed up. The camera would meter the scene (usually using spot metering) and would adjust the shutter speed (and therefore the exposure) itself. This is fine under most circumstances, but becomes an enormous pain in the ass if you’re trying to shoot a bird in flight which keeps crossing above and below the level of the horizon (which most do with ridiculous regularity). Because the sky is very bright relative to most birds and certainly to the sea, as the bird flies you have to constantly adjust the exposure compensation to adjust for the changing background (not necessary if you can keep the subject bang on centre all the time, but I’m not that good!). Anyway, I eventually decided that this was far too much work, made the plunge to using manual and never looked back! Using manual, you can take a couple of test shots to make sure you’ve got the exposure correct, then (providing the light doesn’t change by much) you can ignore it the settings completely and just focus on taking pictures. It also allows you to respond much faster to photographic opportunities because your camera is always ready to go. As long as you remember to check the exposure is still correct when the light levels change it’s dead easy.

3. Know your subject

This is good advice for photographing any wildlife. If you can, try and do a bit of research before you go, so you know which species you are likely to see in an area, what they look like and what their common behaviours are (for example, knowing how different seabirds feed in the water will help you anticipate when and how they will strike the water, allowing you to take a more exciting shot). It will also help you decide if you’re causing a disturbance to the animals, and when you should back off. If you can’t do this in advance, most boats offering wildlife trips will have guides on board (who are often qualified marine biologists) who will be more than happy to talk to you about the different species. Similarly, you can learn a lot about the behaviour patterns of different species just by watching them for a short while, so if you are seeing a lot of one particular species it is often extremely beneficial to observe them for a bit without trying to photograph them. Most species have highly repeated behaviour patterns and once you know what you’re looking for, it’s possible to predict when a gannet is about to make a dive, or when a fulmar is about to take off for example. Similarly, different animals have different ways of flying around boats – gulls and fulmars might glide alongside a boat for a while, but often do it in stages between flying and resting on the sea surface, while kittiwakes will fly in a figure-of-eight pattern behind a boat until they get fed up. Being able to predict how an animal is going to behave will massively help your photography by allowing you to anticipate when the best shot will happen.

4. Get your sea legs on!

 
• Check the weather: Given typical British weather, it’s not always possible to predict what conditions will be like on the day, especially if you’re booking a trip well in advance. Still, if you are able to choose what days you go out on, it’s generally best to start with calm days until you get the hang of things. I generally find that XC Weather gives excellent forecasts for coastal areas and is well worth checking out before you go. 

• Brace yourself: How much a boat moves around will generally depend on its size and how far from shore you’re travelling. Typically, the further from land you go, the bigger the swell will get and the bigger the boat you need to stay stable (there are always exceptions, but it’s a good general rule). If your boat does start moving around, it is usually possible to brace yourself against something for a bit of extra stability, but make sure you keep the camera strap around your neck in such a way that you can drop the camera quickly if you need to hold on. Tuck your elbows into your sides, keeping one hand on the camera body and shutter release, and the other under the barrel of your lens. Standing with your feet apart and knees slightly bent will allow you to use your legs to absorb most of the motion, and standing at about a 45 degree angle to the waves seems to work pretty well. A good, grippy pair of boots is a must for helping you keep your balance.