Glencoe at Speed

Last weekend, conditions in the Scottish mountains were pretty perfect so I headed up to the Nevis range with Kev for a day on the snowboard. From Glasgow, this means about a 3 hour drive up to Fort William via Glencoe and the stunningly beautiful Rannoch Moor. Due to a dead battery in the car, we ended up leaving home a bit later than intended which meant we ended up driving through Rannoch Moor just as the sun was setting behind the mountains with some absolutely stunning lighting.

We stopped in a couple of places to enjoy the snow and the view en route, but unfortunately couldn't stop the car in the moor itself. So, while Kev was driving, I attempted some out-the-window-at-60-mph shots. They're nothing like as nice as you would get from doing this properly, but sometimes the view is just too good to pass up and some of them didn't come out too badly!

Rannoch Moor in the snow at speed!
Click for a larger version.

It was probably one of the most stunning evenings to be in the mountains. Click for a larger version.

The boarding up Nevis was also beautiful, but since it was my first trip up a mountain in a year I elected to leave my DSLR in the car which only left me with my phone to try and do the view any justice at all. And it's got a really crap camera, but you get the idea!

Looking down on Fort William, Loch Eil and Loch Linnhe.
Click for a larger version.

Snow!!
Click for a larger version.

Coming back home we were a little early for the sunset, but thanks to the hordes of people who decided to park on the A82 to use the Glencoe ski resort (yes, it's a 60mph single carriageway; yes parking on it is stupidly dangerous and illegal. Sigh.) we got held up there by the police traffic control for just long enough for the light to get just a little bit better. This time around the view wasn't quite as nice up on the top of the moor, but we found a wee bit to stop at overlooking a frozen lochan which was just stunning and worth getting my shoes full of snow for!

Tracks leading up to a frozen lochan in Rannoch Moor
Click for a larger version.

It's nice to be outside again!

Back to the Blog!

Good morning all!

As I'm sure you've noticed, this blog has had a bit of a gap in updates over the last year or so. Blogger reliably informs me that I haven't actually updated anything here since September 2013, which is slightly horrifying... June 2013 or so was pretty much when my PhD really hit crunch time and led to me spending the following 15 months more or less tied to my computer to finish analyses and get the thing written up.

Happily though, that particular academic chapter of my life has now finally come to an end and I have just received final, formal confirmation from the University that I can at long last call myself Doctor!

Yay! I can have a life again!!

Anyway now that I've finished that, I have been able to start on the rather more enjoyable task of reclaiming my free time for fun stuff again! It's been surprisingly hard to shake the guilty feeling of not working every single day, but with a little help from the Netflix back-catalogue, I'm definitely getting there!

What this means for Wild Ocean Photography and this blog is that you should start to see a return to more regular service again. With a bit of luck we'll have some nice wintery weather over here and I'll be getting out with the camera a bit more regularly from now on. I've also got a few more dive sites guides to add to the list and a couple of gear reviews that I've been wanting to write for a wee while now too so they will all be coming online over the next few weeks.

So, to everyone out there who's still reading this: thanks for your patience and I hope that 2015 will be a wildlife-filled year for us!

Wildlife in the Wind and Rain

The change from summer to autumn has not been subtle this year. Over the course of the last week we've gone from warm, sunny summery days to ... well, today! As always, please click on the images to see them properly.

I can't imagine why no-one was sitting on that bench...

Still, bad weather can make for some cool conditions to take photographs in. A lot of wildlife won't come out when the weather is really bad, but one of the nice things about photographing coastal and marine wildlife is that a little bit of wind and rain doesn't tend to faze them very much!

Breaking waves hammering the seawall at Troon.

So despite the forecast, today we headed south of Glasgow to check out the beaches at Troon (one of my regular spots), Irvine and Ardrossan and see what we could spot. The tides shouldn't have been that great for getting close to the birds (it was low water around lunchtime), but the horrible weather had forced plenty of them high up the shore so we had some nice opportunities. Along the shore we had turnstones and redshanks:

Turnstone on the beach at Troon

Redshank on the shore

I was hoping to find eider ducks sheltering from the weather at the harbour, but they were apparently elsewhere today. There were eight grey seals hanging around though:

Grey seals in the fishing harbour

Of course, it was at this point in proceedings that my trusty 7D + 300mm F4L + 1.4x T.C. combination reached the limits of its weather-sealing abilities and stopped working. No screen, no autofocus, no buttons... Oops. Fortunately a towel dry and a few minutes on the car heater seemed to fix it so hopefully there's no lasting damage. At least it was freshwater for a change too! Of course, that wasn't the only thing I did to the camera today...

After Troon we headed further up the coast to Irvine just in time for the sun to break through for a few minutes.

The beach at Irvine

Having spotted a couple of eider ducks, I decided to test my new walking shoes and climb down the seawall to get down to the beach for a closer view. Neither the boots nor the photo worked particularly well unfortunately and I have a couple of rather large new dents in the camera (and my arm). It still works though, so happy days!

Another couple of war wounds to add to the collection. I suspect I'll never, ever be able to sell this camera second hand. Ever. 

The eider duck photos turned out to be pretty boring in the end, but fortunately a curlew came to the rescue and stood in the sea spray and sunshine for a little while:

A curlew in the waves

After this set I decided I'd left enough blood and camera metal on the shore at Irvine for one day and we headed back to Glasgow via Ardrossan and Largs past some more promising looking beaches which I will check out next time I have a free day.

So all in all it was a pretty successful day out really! Nothing broken, nothing (very) flooded and a few decent photos to show for it. I might wrap the camera in a plastic bag next time right enough.

Photos from Inverary

I'm back! If you're wondering where I've been, read on. If you just want to see some photos from Inverary, you can skip most of this and head straight down to the images!

So if you've been following this blog at all, you've probably noticed that things here have somewhat ground to a halt over the last three months and I have to admit it's entirely PhD-related. I'm coming up to the end of my 3rd year just now, and courtesy of a (really important) conference in June followed by two months working flat-out in an attempt to meet a self-imposed, unrealistic and unnecessary deadline, my stress levels have been creeping progressively higher for a while now. It's been more or less entirely self-inflicted too, but it's meant that I've not been going out to do the things that I find relaxing (like photography) because I've been feeling too guilty about not working. But then the stress gets higher and your work gets worse and all in all, it's a pretty bad place to be. It's fine when it's short-term, but not so great in the long run. I'm sure pretty much everyone has been there at some point.

Last week got to the point where the workplan clearly wasn't working, so I binned my deadline and went back to working the way that works for me (no Gannt charts!) and instantly felt better. This was also pretty much the point I noticed how crap the last 2-3 months have been, and when I also learned that if I don't want to go out with my camera to photograph wild things because of work, I'm probably working too much!

Anyway, this weekend I got the camera back out for wildlife for the first time since my last research cruise in April(!) and we headed up to Inverary (west coast of Scotland) for a day out with the dog. Since it was an an unusually sunny day the town was pretty busy, but there were still a few birds rummaging around the flats at low water when the dog wasn't charging around! I didn't get anything amazing, but here are a few of the better shots:

There were a LOT of jackdaws on the beach, which is a little unusual - most of the times I've been up that way it's been hooded crows everywhere.

These two had a brief fight over a patch of seaweed, which was over in about 5 seconds!

The bright sun didn't make for ideal shooting conditions without a polariser, but allowed for some nice silhouette shots. These are three redshanks and an oystercatcher feeding below the tide line.

Redshanks feeding along the shore.

Until the dog couldn't wait any longer to play in the sea and came to see what I was doing!

Most of the trips our dog gets to the seaside happen when I'm out to take photographs, so it was a pretty awesome day out for him too! Sonny's a rescue dog from the cat & dog home in Glasgow and can be pretty reactive around other dogs, so finding a quiet spot to let him off the lead and play is great!

Sonny

Of course, if I'm taking photos I'm not the one who has to dog-sit. I'm not sure if Kevin had quite as good a day as Sonny and I did!

Heading home via the Loch Fyne brewery, we spotted this small herd of red deer on the hillside too.

So that was our trip out! I'm fully intending to do this more often from now on, so with a bit of luck the blog posts will pick back up again over the next few weeks. Until then, don't forget you can keep up to date with my news and various happenings in the marine world via my facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/wildoceanphotography.

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!

New Deep Sea Gallery on Wild Ocean Photography

Good morning all!

Black coral from 800m

Now I'm back on land after a very muddy two weeks away, I've had a chance to update the website a little bit and have added a new 'Deep Sea Animals' gallery to the Marine ID section. You can check it out here:

http://www.wildoceanphotography.com/deep-sea-animals

And let me know what you think in the comments section below.

A polychaete worm living on a cold-water coral.

Work, work, work (and sea monsters)

It's been a hectic two weeks.

Busy busy busy.

After the weather finally decided to stop chasing us around, we got ourselves over to our study site at the Porcupine Abyssal Plain to start what has probably been the most diverse range of deep-sea work I've encountered on a cruise! We've deployed and recovered environmental moorings, autonomous gliders, and a time-lapse camera ("Bathysnap") that's been photographing the seabed for the last 12 months; we've sliced mud, trapped amphipods and sampled a LOT of water!

Trawling in the Abyss

But the work that I came out here for was the trawling, and despite a couple of minor issues with the net along the way, we managed to catch ourselves a decent selection of fish which will help massively with confirming the species identifications of the fish I'm seeing in my photographs from the region. It's also a bit more data to add to our long-term dataset from the PAP which has been being added to gradually over the last 20 years and is one of only two such datasets to exist in the world, so all of this is pretty valuable.

The benthic fishes include the grenadiers (top four images) and eels (bottom image).

My primary interest is in the benthic fish (the ones that live on or close to the seafloor), like the ones in the image above. However, from a purely photographic point of view it's the pelagic or mid-water species that have been holding my attention over the past few days, because they are brilliantly monstrous little things! Here's a selection (most backgrounds have been photoshopped out and replaced with black):

Female Anglerfish

Female angler fish (head detail).

Gulper Eel (head detail)

Hatchetfish

As usual though, we unfortunately also collected a lot of litter in our catches. It's not surprising - this far offshore there are few regulations regarding the disposal of waste at sea (it's legal to dump most things once you reach international waters), but it's still a shame to think that even out here in an environment that is so distant from us, we're still disturbing and impacting it.

The litter brought up in our first trawl.

A coke can in the net.