A Farne Island Re-look

Every year I try and visit the Farne Islands.  Unfortunately this year I was unable to, especially disappointing as the weather has been particularly dry and sunny.  However, with newer and better software, I have been re-looking at some of my images from previous year and processed them again giving them a ‘fresh lick of paint’.  Some of these I had already processed before, such as the first one but others I’ve looked at from a fresh view.  I’ve put together a few, mostly of Puffins, of my favourites below.

Hopefully next year I’ll make it back there.

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Farne Islands 2017

It’s become an annual ritual to visit the Farne Islands over recent years, so much so that I usually take a week or so off work around the busiest time for the seabirds there. Unfortunately, on all but one occasion it’s been overcast this being the worst trip weather wise.  Not only was there no sunshine at all but it was particularly dim which, if you want to take a photograph of a smallish, fast flying black and white bird against a grey sea or sky, it’s not only difficult to focus but as you can see from the pictures below, makes the image background washed out. 

Now I could with the magic of software, replace the background with blue sky (see below example), but that just wouldn’t feel right to pretend that was the way it was.

You can book your place on one of the many boat services that take you to the islands but I don’t, rather hoping on the day there will be spaces, especially during the week days. However, this time they were booked up and I had to wait a couple of hours for the next available boat with free space.

The trip itself was the usual journey around the islands and a chance to see and photograph the wildlife from the sea, though if you want to take photographs I recommend you get a seat at the side of the boat which I wasn’t and had a hard time trying to get a view past a person who thought it was a good idea to bring their iPad along as a camera (who brings their iPad along as a camera on a boat trip to the Farnes!! Why can’t they just use the camera on their phone?).

If you land on Inner Farne you have to pass by the Terns who nest right on the walkway so are not too happy with people walking by.  A good photo opportunity if you don’t mind braving being attacked by one or more of the angry Terns.  You have two ways to do this.  Follow someone else and let them be the bait and photograph the Terns attacking them or put a wide angle lens on your camera set it to a fast frame rate, manual focused to around a foot and just hold that above your head as you move through a swarm of them.

It is mainly the Puffins I come to see and photograph however, though perhaps next time I might just spend a bit more time looking around and just enjoying the brief time you have on the island.  I spent too much time trying in vain to get decent images of the Puffins flying in from the sea and conditions were just against me.  Not only the lack of contrast of the bird against the background made focusing difficult in the grey, dull conditions but I had to use exposure compensation to prevent a dark silhouette, which instead meant blowing out the skies.  A quick bit of editing below could fix that but not sure about the photographic ethics of that.

Trying to photograph the Puffins in the sky meant I neglected what was happening on the ground.  Anyone who has been to the Farnes will know what a hard time these poor Puffins have when brining in food for their young as waiting by their burrows are various gulls, ambushing the Puffins on arrival.  To avoid this, the Puffins try to fly literally, into their burrows.  This means getting that iconic image of a Puffin standing around with a beak full of eels, difficult, but if you’re quick you might get an action shot of the gull trying to rob an incoming Puffin.

The next couple of photographs are poor but do show a few things.  The first just how close the Puffins get when flying in and can fly right past you.  The second, just how close the an angry Tern can get to you.

Photographic Details

If you’re interested the technical details all but the last were taken with the Canon 400mm f5.6 lens, the last being a Canon 17-40mm at the widest view.  Because of the lighting conditions exposure compensation of +1-2 stops was given.  Auto ISO was also used.

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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!

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A cold, damp day in June…

…so, it’s a typical summer weekend then!  One step out of my door at 6:00 am this morning and I nearly went back in for my gloves and scarf.  A quick mental check  to remind myself that it was indeed June and I continued on my journey.  A bit of researching and messing around with my camera focusing settings, wanted me to put these into practice and see if they would make any difference to capturing birds in flight – in this case Turns – but first a stop off at the woods to see what was stirring.

Quite a bit of growth had taken place since my last visit when the ferns were just taking hold. They now carpeted the woodland floor, making spotting my first photographic hopeful, Roe Deer, more difficult, as I just stumbled upon the first five encounters, wondering how on earth I manage to miss them. I decided to just sit down and hopefully let them come to me, so with my back to a tree and netting over my camera, lens and monopod I made myself ‘comfortable’.  The lighting was very poor, despite picking a relatively open area and so had to crank up the ISO to 1600, though even this wasn’t enough as when my first opportunity came along – a male Roe – I had only 1/60th but managed to get him to stop with the sound of my shutter.  Later, I tried the same trick with a female Roe but she either she didn’t hear it or ignored it and continued on her way, as a result of which most of the shots were blurred due to movement.. All the Roe Deer had now traded in their dull dark grey/brown winter coat for a more attractive reddish brown summer one.

I had hoped that by the time I reached my next destination, the light would have improved as the forecast was for a bit of sun!  Not a chance, if anything it was becoming gloomier.  I started off with a few ‘still’ shots including a rather damp looking Mallard, a Little Grebe with its catch and a few others before my first real opportunities, Terns, came along. As it turned out, this didn’t really give me the opportunity and had hoped for a number of reasons.  The blanket greyness gave little contrast for the AF system to work at its best.  Exposure was a problem for a white birds flying against a pale grey background would need exposure compensation but it also flew across a background of trees which, if leaving the first exposure compensation, caused the Tern to come out overexposed.  The slight underexposure was causing increase digital noise, so I felt what could have been some really good images, turned out disappointing.  On top of this, the Tern decided to do all his hovering and best moves with their back to me. In the end then, I didn’t really manage to test anything, so will have to try again if and when we get some summer sunshine.

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