Seth playing in the sea (and Jacob looking cute!)

I've added some pictures from earlier this summer to my pets and animals page on my web site We went down the the slipway at high tide on a sunny day and messed about! Seth enjoyed fetching his ball out of the waves an Jacob just chilled out being cute!

More 60mm f2.8 pictures

Some more shots from yesterday. The bokeh on this lens really impresses me

Gnarly old trout!

Congratulations to Scott Evans for completing his PADI Digital Underwater Photography and EANx specialities yesterday. DUP is of course an excellent excuse for me to get my camera in the water at the same time! I was trying out my "new" Nikkor 60mm f2.8. I got it at the same time as my 105mm VR and it has played second fiddle to the longer lens for a while. I have found that it is a REALLY sharp lens, that focuses fast and is a great length for fish portaits.

While diving with it yesterday here at Capernwray, I found this battered old brown trout. Trout, when they reach a certain age, develop a pronounced hook jaw (when they are called a kype), and in the last stages of their lives, darken in colour.

I've added more pictures from the day to my www site here

Morecambe Bay sunset HDR

Slave strobes at Capernwray

A black and white shot from the shoot with Alex that I mentioned earlier!

More black and white seal shots from the Farne Islands

Baitball bonanza

Baitball bonanza

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Black and White seal

Fantastic seal diving at the Farnes

As a part of Alex Mustard's Northern tour(!) we went to Northumberland to dive on the Farne Islands. This island chain is well known for it's playful seals and we went with the express intention of trying to photograph them. We joined Paul Walker's excellent rib and spent an amazing hour and a half playing, interacting and photographing these wonderful creatures. The first dive was characterised by seals biting and tugging on our fins, biting my dome port shade and strobes and generally showing how poor our buoyancy control and propulsion techniques are! Photographically, the conditions were perfect. Bright sunshine and shallow water, with relatively calm water made for some great scenic shots. I found getting the exposure correct challenging, the brightness of the surface was too great a contrast with the bottom. Camera angle relative to the sun, and framing are the key though!

The picture above is one of Alex's of me taking the mouth picture below! I'll feed more pictures from the dive onto this blog over the next few weeks. It was an amazing dive-world class!

Off camera flash and underwater photography

I've been involved in a project with Alex Mustard in using slave strobes to acheive an off camera type effect. We took some pictures at Capernwray last Wednesday, and I ws amazed at the results. We used a combination of a Heinrichs Weikamp slave strobe adaptor that triggered a Sea and Sea YS30 and in turn two big Subtronic strobes. In fact though I brought along a Firefly 1 slave set up, designed for use in dry caves, and put it into an Otter box. The results were excellent.I'll post some pictures here soon