Bempton Cliffs from the sea on the Yorkshire Bell Part 2 - Diving Gannets

After the excitement of the Black-browed Albatross and Arctic Skua it was on with the main target of this cruise, the diving Gannets.

If anyone missed Part 1 of this post the Albatross was the main feature seen from very close to the boat.

The Gannets were encouraged to dive by putting fish out for them and they soon responded.

The following pictures were taken using the often mentioned pre-burst feature on my camera. It involved watching where the thrown fish landed, pointing the camera at that bit of sea with the shutter button half pressed, and waiting for the splash of a Gannet going in then fully pressing the shutter to capture the before and after of the splash. There are a lot lot of other settings to get right as well but the pre-burst is the key one.

Anything a Gannet can do I can do nothing like as well.

Still got the fish though.

Watch out there's another Gannet coming in, I'm surprised they don't spear each other.

Here comes another one.

A couple of single entry point shots from other sequences.

There were still other things to see though most of which featured in Part 1.

All in all one of the best days wildlife watching my wife and I have ever had and one of my best days photography coupled with a huge editing task.

Thanks for viewing, hope you enjoy looking at them.

Very best wishes

Trevor

  • Trevor,
    You have some absolutely cracking/stunning images there. Well done with capturing the action. I look forward to seeing what you can capture on your next day out. :-)
  • Great post Trevor and a fantastic sequence showing the gannet diving action and how they fold their wings right in like a dart to enter the water; those were sizeable fish !
  • Just a great set of photos, thanks for posting
  • Phenomenal set Trevor, rounding off the trip beautifully. I always love splashed water around the birds, showing their movement traces.
    And thanks for your time in the editing and posting of them!!
  • Another great set of pics Trevor, it is an amazing place Bempton. Next time we must try the boat trip. I must sort my pics out and get some posted.
  • Thanks Tony,
    The post trip editing can be quite a task after a place like that. I came home with nearly 3000 pictures (spread over 4 days), even after deleting the obvious failures as I went, then a first edit at home halved that. After that I just cherry picked a selection of the very best and will have to make time to sort them all the rest later.
    Looking forward to seeing your pictures,
    All the best,
    Trevor
  • Thanks so much for taking the time to edit and post up all those photos for us to enjoy Trevor, the Gannet is a remarkable bird and to see it diving like an arrow into the sea and not hit another doing the same is brilliant, superb pics.
  • Wow!

    Such a fabulous collection of photos Trevor.

    I dread to think how many you took, but I'd bet it was a tough job sorting which ones to keep.

    Thank you for sharing, and I could more than believe it was one of the best days wildlife watching.

  • Hi Mike,
    Thank you for the Wow, I'm more than happy with the results of the boat trip and as for editing I've only done a rough edit of the real failures and saved everything else. I save all my photos to a 1TB external Hard Drive and back up to a second one, one day I'll have to trawl through everything and reduce the numbers but I do try and cherry pick the very best and file them separately.
    I was using the highest burst speed but how many pictures a second I take on a burst I'm never sure of, my camera has a theoretical top burst of 60 frames/sec but that is influenced by focus mode (20 Frames/sec on constant AF) and I think shooting in RAW and JPEG slows it down a bit as does the type SD card, I use a 300mb/s V90 card.
    All the best,
    Trevor
  • Wow, that was wonderful to look through! I've yet to go on one of the boat trips from Bridlington but I think I really must talk Limpy into it next year. The gannets are awesome but I also (inevitably) love the cheeky herring gull who has clearly found a technique that works.