A short, long Farne Island trip

What is now becoming a bit of an annual pilgrimage at the back end of June for me, is a trip to the Farne Island.  At this time of year the chicks have hatched, particularly the Puffins, and so there is a feeding frenzy on before most of the Islands occupants move on in a few months time. This year I took a change of lens with me.  Instead of the usual 400mm I took the Sigma 500mm just to see if it made any difference – it did, but more in a negative way, the reasons of which I hope to cover in a future post, lets just say having a more mobile lens to photograph birds that are all around you and where getting close is not an issue, was more important.  From a photographic point of view, the day was very disappointing with poor light for most of the time and only a couple of images turning out to be what I would call decent, but the trip itself can’t fail but be an amazing sceptical and always worth it. So out of the few that did survive being deleted, these are probably some of the better ones.

Guillemot with chick taken from the boat

Strangely enough, my favourite image of the trip came, not from the big lens, but from my 17-40mm @ 17mm

They don’t always have to be close ups – Puffin with a backdrop of grey skies

Each year I’ve wanted to get the iconic image of the Puffin with a mouth full of eels, but for most of them, arriving back to the chicks means being ‘mugged’ by awaiting gulls so they don’t tend to hang around.  However on the cliff edges away from the main Puffin borrows and the gulls, seems to be a bit more relaxed and this lone Puffin posed for me long enough for me to get a converter attached and was the only time having the extra reach of the 500mm (plus x1.4 converter) lens was an advantage. Perhaps, at least in part, the reason for the lack of photographic success on this occasion was my using public transport to get to Seahouses, the jump off point to the Farne Islands, which meant I was shattered by the time I started photographing.  Despite being relatively close to Newcastle, the journey took nearly three and a half hours as a rather uncomfortable bus went to every small village and town on the east coast of Northumberland south of Seahouses!  Add to this a delay due to the tide in setting off, the boat trip that lasts over an hour (it tours the islands), leaving officially and hour on the island, though more like forty five minutes once disembarked and on location.  All in all, I left home at 7:30 am and got back 8:45 pm – a long day for 45 minutes!