Latest News - News and Updates

Today (2/12/11) is the last day to pre-order a Wild Ocean Photography calendar for 2012 and guarantee a copy in time for Christmas!

The 2012 Wild Ocean Photography Calendar is now available for pre-order! To see this year's designs and to place an order, please check out the link HERE.

As usual, I'll be placing the order with the printers at the end of November, so make sure you place your pre-orders early to ensure that you receive your copy! These calendars are always popular and the few extra ones we print usually go very fast. All orders placed will be with you in time for Christmas as well (failing the implosion of the British postal service), and they make excellent gifts for wildlife lovers!

I'm currently working up the 2012 WOP calendars, and am hoping to have them ready for sale in the next couple of weeks once I get the samples back from the printer.

They will cost £12 + P&P each, and will feature a selection of my best images from the last year. These are always popular and in limited supply, so if you would like to order one, make sure you watch the news feed for information on when and how you can pre-order your copy!

Well, after 9 weeks away nearly non-stop, I'm finally back home for a bit of a break which means that all the photos from the recent blogs will be going up online over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on the website for those.

I'm also planning a couple of changes to the layout of the site, part of which will probably involve taking down the Marine ID section, so if there are any images in there that you are particularly fond of, now's the time to let me know!

So it's been a busy month work-wise and a quiet one wildlife-wise, but I did manage to get away for a bit of a break at the weekend. Sadly, most of the wildlife was bugs of the biting variety (and elk-flies, which are probably amongst the most horrible things I've ever encountered), but we were treated to one of the clearest nights I can remember seeing, which, in the darkness of the country made for the most amazing view of the night sky! I don't think I really managed to do it justice, but here's my attempt:

The last couple of days have been pretty calm and quiet up here, which is lovely. The weather has turned back to being lovely and hot and sunny, and the evenings have been really still, which has made for some nice conditions for photographing the life.



I'm sure there are still a lot of birds around that I haven't seen yet, and pretty much every day I'm finding something new! Last night, I managed a quick shot of a young corn bunting (I believe) before it got too spooked and flew off. My largest lens is a 300mm with 1.4x converter, so I tend not to spend too much time trying to catch the smaller birds as they're usually too quick or too far away. This one paused just long enough and just close enough for me though!



At the moment, there are a lot of young herring in the bay outside the labs, and they were splashing around at the surface a lot last night, which was lovely as it was so calm it was lovely to watch. We thought they were being hunted by something, but it turns out they were actually the ones doing the hunting, and were chasing small sandeels out of the water! It took a long time to get the photo I wanted, but I'm pretty pleased with the way this one's come out!



Anyway, I'm off to get some food from town and will be back later this evening to see what else I can find to shoot!

Well, today was good fun! The weather for the past 2 days has been pretty minging, with torrential downpours, heavy rain and patches of beautiful sunshine (very much like Scotland really!). Today however was much nicer, which was just as well since we had to test our underwater survey equipment today down at the pier. To give some background, this isn't a particularly entertaining job, as the kit basically gets put in the sea and then stays there for an hour after which time we pull it up and go through the images etc. to make sure it's worked then repeat it all again. Fortunately for me though, the pier has a lot of birds around it, so I got to spend a good 2-3 hours sitting and practicing my photography with a family of incredibly obliging swallows. There are loads of swallows here actually, with a lot of families nesting in the car tyres they hang by the water's edge as bumpers for the boats coming in and out, so there is always plenty of activity. Today though, one young swallow decided not to wait around in its nest to be fed, and instead took up residence on the edge of the pier and on a mooring rope a couple of metres from where I was sitting to keep an eye on the equipment. I'm pretty pleased with the photos I got (indulge me, there are quite a few!):


We're going to be testing the kit again tomorrow at the pier so I might spend a bit more time with the cormorants and terns rather than the swallows, but we'll see! The swallows are being incredibly obliging at the moment after all.

So, that's me arrived in Sweden to spend a month doing some underwater photo and video work in the Kosterfjord region. We're staying at the Sven Loven Centre for Marine Science in Tjarno, which is one of the most peaceful and secluded places I've been to in a while (excluding the middle of the Atlantic obviously!). The climate and landscape is pretty similar to the west of Scotland, with big pine forests all around the town which sits right on the coast. I've not spent a great deal of time out with the camera as yet since we've been mostly settling in (and today's weather was horrendous!), but it's looking really promising for the wildlife so far, with crested tits and treecreepers bouncing around in the woods just along from our accommodation and cormorants, hooded crows, pied wagtails, guillemots and swallows in the bay. I haven't managed any brilliant images as yet, but I'll hopefully be able to get some improved ones over the next few weeks while we're here.

So that's me back on dry land now for a couple of days, before I head off to Sweden on Friday for another 4 weeks of field work at Tjarno in the Kosterhavet National Park. I'm pretty excited about this trip and I'm hoping that we're going to get to see some pretty cool things while we're there. The main aims of this piece of work are to examine how different survey methods can be used to detect and identify fish in both shallow and deep (~150m) waters. While this is normally pretty shallow for 'deep-sea' animals, because of some unusual ocean currents, the Kosterfjord where we're working contains a layer of deep oceanic water which allows deep-sea animals to occur in much shallower water than they would usually be found in which is great for us for this study. I will keep you updated as we go, but we should be getting some good underwater images of the deep-sea while we're there!

Also, as you may have noticed, I've made a bit of a change to the news pages so it reads more like a blog. This means I can no longer have a summary of the news post on the homepage though, so you'll need to click on the headline to see the news. But if you're reading this, you probably worked that out already!

So we spent 4 weeks at sea, and everything happens in the last day! So far today, we've spent about an hour outside and seen at least 6 whales (though distant ones) and a small group of pilot whales, lots more seabirds and great, sooty and Manx shearwaters (but only one of the latter I think).



The most exciting thing though was a small group of what we believe were Atlantic Bluefin Tuna which were hunting at the surface of the sea and leaping around in the surf. They were a bit far off, so the shots below have been cropped a fair bit (approx. 1500x2500 pixels max at full size), but they're pretty cool. If the ID is correct, then these are photos of a critically endangered species. Anyway, I'm going back out to see what else is around!



EDIT: What else was there was a wee pod of common dolphins!

Well, that's us just got 2 days left of the research cruise and all we've really got left to do is packing and cleaning. We moved from the (abyssal site which we were working at for the first 3 weeks) to a shallower site in the Porcupine Seabight (about 1000m) a couple of days ago and have been here since then. There has been a bit more in the way of wildlife, with a small group of shearwaters following the boat this morning and a much bigger group of fulmars following us too. The fulmars appeared to be drinking the water around the boat, so perhaps they were following us for the fresh water overflow gets discharged from the grey water tanks on board? Any suggestions are gratefully received, but they were definitely licking the surface of the sea!





We finish our last few pieces of work tonight and will be setting off for home between 4 and 6am on Sunday morning, so will see what we see tomorrow as we head back towards land! Apparently we can't get into Falmouth to dock until late in the evening on Monday, so will have most of the day for (hopefully) some coastal photography from a part of the UK I don't get the chance to visit often enough.

Well, it's been another long couple of weeks at sea since I last updated, and they're keeping us pretty busy collecting, sorting and preserving various mud samples from the deeps. We have had another 2 trawls since my last post, and although the abyss is not the most diverse place in the world for numbers of fish species, we have had a few more types of fish in the trawls, including one enormous slickhead which was too heavy for our scales, but probably weighed in at around 8kg.



I'm still on night shifts, so there hasn't been much opportunity for taking wildlife photos, though there is still relatively little to see. There have been lots of very distant whale spouts, and a number of fin and sperm whale sightings and there are still the usual shearwaters and fulmars gliding over the waves! For the last 2 days we have had two little castaways on board as well - two little birds that settled in for the night on top of the liferafts and which have been scampering around the back of the boat today. I have no idea what species they are though, so if anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them!



I also had a play around with some very high ISO photographs the other night as there was a group of shearwaters fishing very close to the boat at around 3am. Since I have no flash with me, and the only light was from the deck, I was quite impressed with the shots. Don't get me wrong- these are not award-winning images and they are VERY noisy! But considering they are black birds and I was shooting in near total darkness mostly with manual focus, I think the 7D has done pretty well all things considered, and the photos are good enough for ID purposes if nothing else.

If you want to know what I am actually doing out here in the Porcupine abyssal plain, I wrote a blog post for the National Oceanographic Centre (NOC) cruise blog which you can have a look at here: Cruise Blog

An update on my current travels to the Porcupine Abyssal Plain and my plans for the next couple of months.

Wild Ocean Photography is going to be taking a break for the next 2 months while I head offshore to the deep waters of the Atlantic and Swedish fjords to collect specimens and data for my PhD. I'll be back in October, hopefully with rather a lot of photographs to share!

A brand new Seascapes gallery is up, and the other galleries have been reorganised into a more sensible structure today. If you have any comments about the new layout or the site in general, I'd love to hear from you, so please don't hesitate to get in touch.

New images are now up in the Seabirds gallery (gannets and guillemots) and I'll be posting a lot of new shots later this week to improve the Marine ID section as well.

Otters, guillemots and divers this weekend in Oban!

The 2011 calendars have now been ordered, so if you pre-ordered one you'll be receiving it soon I hope (unless this new bout of snow causes more postal delays). If you haven't already ordered one, but would like one then get in quick because stocks are now limited!