Strumble Diary 18/3/16. More porp's

Got there a couple hours before high tide, wonderful light and was onto porpoises pretty much immediately. Onto them, but they were as usual about as predictable as lottery numbers. Often one would pop up in the viewfinder I would be ready to shoot on the next surfacing but nope finito! no subsequent surfacing, Eventually I got a few shots but the motley crew seemed largely to be feeding on something else, probably small fry,  rather than chasing the porpoises.
 

Unless you have tried photographing porpoises that are often more than half a mile away you might think it easy but it ain't!  Firstly you need to find them in your binoculars which have a relatively large field of view and give a pretty clear image similar to the one above.

You then have to switch to your camera then,  relocate the porpoise in the much smaller viewfinder which gives a minute field of view and a much worse image more like the one above, especially if a cold northeasterly is making your eyes water! Having got something in the viewfinder which of course dips beneath the waves immediately, you tense yourself ready to shoot as soon as it pops back up again, if it pops back up again!

 If it does not you have to repeat the process until with a bit of luck you find the porp in your bin's then manage to quickly relocate in the camera viewfinder and then please!!! it shows again and you shoot in time to get a picture!

It is sometimes possible to spot the gulls chasing the porpoises with the naked eye which cuts out the need to first spot the porpoises with your binoculars if you can use the gulls as a marker for where the porps are among hundreds of acres of often  featureless sea.

Often you don't know what you actually got until you feed the memory card into your laptop and then see it on the bigger screen. On the camera you might only have a vague idea of what you got but on your laptop the bigger image might reveal that there were actually three animals in shot as above!

Anyhow if all goes well and you get something you can crop and adjust the brightness etc and have a reasonable view of something that would have been impossible ten years ago!