I’ve just got back from Skomer Island.  Now, Skomer Island has been on my ‘must visit’ list for some time.  At the start of this year I put it firmly on the ‘this year list’ but it had to be in nesting time for the puffins.  Prime time is June and July.  June was wiped out by work (and dodgy summer weather) and July looked like it was going the same way weather wise.  I kept checking the forecasts but there didn’t seem to be a settled good weather window.  On Monday, mid week looked possible.  Tuesday confirmed Wednesday and Thursday as likely sunny but this is the UK so no guarantees.  On Wednesday morning, very early, I set off on the 250 odd mile drive to the far end of Pembrokeshire.  By 11 am I was on Skomer by 11:15 I was photographing puffins.  

If you want to cut straight to the photos, I’ve added a puffin page here.  If you want to know a bit more about the photography aspect, read on.   

Well, puffin nesting was in full swing.  Pretty much by mid-July all the egg incubating is over and parents are well into feeding with a good many pufflings (yes, that is what the young are called) having fledged and departed for the North Atlantic.  In a couple or so more weeks the rest will have flown and the over 20,000 adults will have gone too and the island will be quiet in the daytime.  (At night it’s different.  Skomer is a world important site for Manx Shearwaters but they also nest in burrows but only come in at night.)  

Photography wise, on the ground, puffins are not exactly a big challenge.  As long as you respect them (stick to the paths and give them some space) they really will scuttle about, often crossing the paths between watchers (give way).  Getting interesting pictures is a little harder but well worth a bit of effort.  

Puffins on the wing are an entirely different matter; doubly so to catch one with the beak full of sandeels. These birds prove to be miniature low flying evasive missiles - right up to the point they attempt to land where the effort to bleed of all the airspeed and dive into a burrow with a beak full of food intact often results in a bit of an awkward controlled crash landing.  The reason for this speedy and inelegant arrival is the gulls who harass the puffins on the way to the nest and who will grab any unwary puffling.  The big black backed gulls are the most feared and the arrival or movement of one of these can create a fair stir in the rookery.  But the smaller lesser black backed gulls and herring gulls are also on constant aerial patrol.  Watch carefully while trying to photograph and patterns begin to emerge.  The puffins will use the wind to approach and lift over the cliff.  Usually all the birds will follow the same approach path but shifts in wind will see them modify the lines.  If they are not happy that their approach will take them right to the nest they will ‘go-around’.  Keep your eye on that bird and it will swing out (often up to half a mile away) and then circle back in.  You then have to pick up the bird head on as a tiny dot follow its flight path an then try to pick it up on autofocus either head on or in a high-speed sweeping pan as it shoots into the nest.  That’s as hard photography as I’ve ever done and it takes a while to get the movement right.  These are really fast little things.  

So, what does it take to capture puffins in flight.  Well, I really gave my new Nikon D500 a thorough workout and it proved very good.  The toughest part was just getting focus lock with the AF sensors (I used the Group AF mode) on a big enough approaching bird before releasing the shutter.  In most cases, although you may have been watching ‘your bird’ for a minute or two, the critical judgement point and shooting window proved to be between 1/4 (i.e. 2 or 3 frames) up to about, but very rarely, 1 second (10 frames).  Normally, it was in the 2 or 3 frames window.  I didn’t get it right a lot of the time and had a lot of well framed but not in focus frames.  This was, I worked out, down to operator error.  If you don’t get the AF sensor on that fast moving small bird at the right time, it will simply focus on something in the background and it doesn’t quickly shift focus onto your subject when you do get the sensors on it.  Instead, you have to release and re-press the AF button to acquire focus.  Release and and re-press in that critical 1/4 second window - well good luck with that.  Its really a case of having to get it right first time or puffin has passed you by out of focus.  But I did have a good percentage of in-focus shots too where I did get it right.  My feeling was that I did respectably well here.  There were quite a few other serious photographers about and I didn’t feel they were catching the moment as frequently.  One of the main reasons was I opted for the 70-200 f/4 lens.  This is a light high quality lens and on a crop sensor gives a 300mm equivalent.  I could really pan and handle the lens very easily handheld.  I noticed many others were using far longer lenses. (There were a good number of super telephoto primes and 500/600* zoom types either on full frame cameras or crop cameras.)  Personally I felt they were too unwieldy and offered less chance of a capturing the shot but i did feel a little odd-one-out opting for the shorter lens.  The puffins on Skomer are unusually accommodating in coming close enough to make a 300mm lens equivalent very useful.  Most of the images on the main page are only mildly cropped and you need a bit of space around the subject to track it and not chop off ‘bits’ of the bird.  (I’ve quite a lot of outtakes where the bird has over filled the frame but there was usually one or two in the sequence that proved very good.)  

I anticipate going back to Skomer.  Maybe to see those Manx Shearwaters at night.  No idea how to photograph them in the dark though as flash would be utterly inappropriate for vulnerable birds trying to land in the dark on a rocky island.  

In the meantime, the mass puffin experience, while not the wildebeests of the Serengeti, is quite unforgettable. 

* I will say, that my 200-500mm stayed in my bag most of the day but I did get it out while waiting for the ferry at the end of the day and I did get some good shots at 500mm.  That did surprise me a bit but by then I’d had a lot of practice but the failure rate with the 500 was still a lot higher.