St Abbs

My first dive trip out of lockdown was on a long-planned Worcester Divers trip to St Abbs, on the East coast and just over the border into Scotland. In view of the pandemic, I had expected this trip to be cancelled, but to my delight we got the green light. This area has some outstanding diving and not only were we lucky to travel, but we dived it in ideal conditions – the westerly air stream had kept the sea flat and we were blessed with plenty of sunshine.

St Abbs is a nearly ideal dive location, as the main dive sites are reached by only a few minutes travel time in the boat – just long enough to kit up, in fact! Paul, the skipper of “Shore Diver”, is a diver himself and so knew exactly where to drop us in. Highlights were anemone gully, Tye’s tunnel and Skellies Hole. All of these have amazing topography to enjoy, as well as excellent wildlife for our photography.

Some of the group stayed in self-catering accommodation in the harbour, whilst myself and a couple of others parked our campervans on the quayside. This lack of travel time meant that we completed three dives per day, without it seeming like an effort. And there are so many subjects to go at, that I was grateful to be able to spend three hours per day underwater.

St Abbs is a great wildlife location, but it is particularly interesting for divers because it contains such a variety of life. Many southern species are in evidence, alongside many species usually seen further north. Sadly I was not able to capture a useful picture of the wolf fish, emblematic of the area, but the crustaceans, fish and soft corals were seen in abundance.

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Winter wonders

With all the bleak weather, it’s easy to forget that the underwater world serenely carries is n beneath the waves of the Scottish sea lochs. Today we had a dip in Duich this morning and returned to the Loch Carron narrows at Strome this afternoon. I love both these sites; Loch Duich is home to all three UK species of sea pen, and it’s my favourite spot to shoot fireworks anemones, but today I was interested in the communities with cram themselves on the rocks. Much of the Loch bed is mud and looks barren at first (though there is actually a lot of activity). One finds occasional rocks which give sea Loch anemones, brittle stars, sea squirts and squat lobsters something to hold fast to or hide under.

Strome this afternoon was alive with small critters (as always) and provided me with plenty of macro opportunities from tiny Isopods in the dead men’s fingers, to queen scallops filtering their dinner from the tide and gobies showing off in the shallows

Defying Dennis

February half term is a favourite time of mine to make a pilgrimage to the west coast of Scotland. My buddy Rob and I picked Loch Carron, but had not reckoned on storm Dennis. The poor driving conditions did not deter us and we took the East coast route to Inverness, avoiding the winding A82 past Loch Lomond. Arriving at about 10pm, we chose our overnight camping spot thinking we had shelter, but it was a wild night indeed.

The following morning it was still pretty wild at North Strome, one of the best shore diving sites in the UK, but it was serene underwater. I was keen to try out my new backscatter MF-1 strobe and snoot, to grab some super macro shots. I hinted in on the tiny amphipods swarming on the dead man’s fingers, only a few mm long. On the way back, I could not resist also having a go at the little gobies in the shallows.

It must be spring

Spring has sprung – despite distinctly murky conditions on the James Eagan Lane this weekend, there were Oaten Pipe Hydroids (Tubularia indivisa) aplenty to see. The numbers of these marvellous creatures explode in early spring, that is until the nudibranch eggs hatch and they all get munched!

Nikon D500, Nikon AF-S 60mm with +5 diopter

Fireworks and flame shells

Underwater photographers tend to take a different view of dive sites on a trip to non-shooting divers. We will often be keen to keep returning to the same site repeatedly on a trip rather than trying to see a different site on each dive. So it was on a recent trip to West Scotland, I dived in only two sites. In each of two sea lochs, I dived in a single area. However these were very much contrasting locations, one a very clean high energy site needing slack water and the other a slightly murky low energy spot. Each is home to unusual but “locally common” species, well worth braving the 6-degree water temperature for.

Loch Duich is home to the impressive fireworks anemone and the maerl bed of the narrows at the head of Loch Carron is home to hidden flame shells, as well as a mass of macro subjects. Here are a selection of images to give a flavour of the sites.

First of all, Loch Duich:

And here’s North Strome on Loch Carron:

Looking for skeletons

One of the pleasures of underwater photography is learning about sea life which many divers don’t even know exist. The Skeleton Shrimp (Caprella linearis) is one such species. They are not exactly tiny (up to 2cm long) and are actually really quite common. It’s just that they are very difficult to see. They spend their lives clinging to other sea life, grabbing food particles from the water. They are usually seen on hydroids, because they are easy to spot there, though they inhabit many other hosts which get them into the current, such as Dead Men’s Fingers, but are much harder to spot on those.

So it was, I spent a very enjoyable dive in Loch Creran recently hunting for these critters. They have often been photographed before and I wanted to make a different kind of image to what I had seen previously. By using a high-power diopter, I concentrated on just the head of the creature, shooting across the hydroid fronds. Shooting an abundant species allowed me to hunt down a suitable rock with a conveniently placed hydroid, so I could shoot without disturbing the fine silt ubiquitous at this site. I like this shot because it shows the shrimp through the fronds of the hydroid, like an elusive jungle animal seen through the undergrowth. The shallow depth of field of the diopter ensures subject separation by throwing the hydroid out of focus.

On the other hand, this second capture unintentionally caught the shrimp with its claw arms wide. It made me smile because whereas the first image seemed to say “you can’t see me”, the second seemed to say “Ta-da! Here I am!!”

Nikon D500 + micro Nikkor 105mm + Nauticam SMC.

Through the looking glass…

During a recent trip to lovely Loch Linnhe, I spotted a tiny juvenile squat lobster hiding in a decaying piece of wood. I have to confess to an addiction to these charismatic creatures; I love their bright orange colour, the Popeye aggression with which the wave their claws and the intricate detail of their jointed bodies. I had promised myself that I would not shoot any on this trip, but I decided to change that to “I won’t shoot any adults” (I *nearly* managed that).

In fact this gave me a change to try out two diopter lenses for getting closer to tiny critters. On the first of two dives at the same site from a beach in Kentallen, I tried out a fairly standard +5 wet diopter and the following day, I tried out a Nauticam SMC, a much heavier and powerful lens (lent to me by a friend).

I found the SMC easier to get focussed (for both lenses, I used autofocus to get the focus to the correct position and then “rocked” to get the subject in focus). The shallower depth of field of the SMC gives a more pleasing effect, but I was more interested in how sharp the images might be – it was hard to get the images properly focused, but I am pleased wit the results from both. The SMC gives higher magnification and adds drama to the image, but its much harder to get it in focus. In particular, it is important to get ones “ducks in a row” – in other words, the points in the frame which need to be sharp must be in the same plane. This makes framing the image hard at times – I like the composition below, but I was struggling to get both of the squattie’s eyes sharp.

Both images have been cropped from portrait format but have the full width of the frame.

Top: D500, Nikon 105mm + Nauticam SMC, ISO200 f/32, 1/100s.
Bottom: D500, Nikon 105mm + AOC+5 diopter, ISO320 f/20, 1/125s

Remote strobes

It’s been a while since I played with remote strobes, so this weekend (having been been blown out by poor Bank Holiday weather) decided to try this technique in a local quarry. In a bid to get the creative juices working at a less familiar site, my buddy and I picked the National Dive Centre in Chepstow, a location I have dived less often than other fresh water sites in the Midlands.

The idea with remote strobes is to light a subject without using the strobes attached to the camera. This has the advantage of using a light source close to the subject but further away from the camera and so giving good lighting but with a minimum of backscatter.

The NDAC, like many quarries has a lot of scrap metal and I chose a Wessex helicopter as my subject. The aircraft was reasonably intact and has a large (dark) internal space. There’s a lot of setup time needed for remote strobe work and I was privileged to have a buddy prepared to set aside his camera and carry the extra strobes for me. It was just as well really, as of the two strobes I was hoping to place, one of them refused to work at all (despite having worked when I tested it before the dive). The vis was quite good (about 8-10m) and so I tried working from further back than usual, to catch the whole aircraft. I tucked the strobe (a Sea & Sea YS-110) inside the doorway, set on half power and pointing inward toward my buddy, who swam slowly out of the doorway.

The exposure was set as if for available light only, with the ISO high enough to provide a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the bubble motion (1/100s); since I was at least a few feet from the nearest part of the wreck, an aperture of f/8 was enough to ensure the whole frame was in focus. I used a single strobe on a low power setting solely to trigger the remote strobe.

I had my buddy shine a torch towards the strobe so that the flash light is “connected” to the subject. It takes a lot of practice to get all the aspects of this technique right and in hindsight, the strobe is not far enough behind the doorway, some flare is still visible. The diver is perhaps rather small in the frame and so the effect of the remote strobe is rather subtle; on the whole I think it needs a smaller subject, so that I can have the whole wreck but with the diver larger in the frame. Just another reason to go back and try again…