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

  • TJS said:
    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

    You're welcome Trevor.

    And I feel upto 7 frames/sec is a lot!

    And  phew! I thought I was the only one to back up photos to an Ext HD, except mine are 2TB.

    I have tried online, OneDrive and Dropbox, but they don't retain the tech details of the photos, exposure, aperture etc, plus I can't justify the subscription costs when an EHD is perfectly good enough.

  • Hi Mike,
    Fortunately large capacity hard drives are not that expensive these days so I prefer to have my own personal Cloud storage.
    Trevor
  • Hi Clare,

    Thank you and glad you enjoyed the pictures. The RSPB Boat Trip certainly gives you a different perspective and photo opportunities and I will try and make one a part of any trip to Flamborough Head.

    As you enjoyed the Herring Gull here's another.

    I'm not sure if this dive was successful.

    Best Wishes,

    Trevor