Photographing Seals from a dingy…

Back at the end of May (that feels long ago now) I headed up to Scotland to meet up with Tim and go on a sailing adventure around the West Coast.

One of our stops was at (one of many) absolutely STUNNING locations, Arisaig. We had anchored in the bay and not too far from our boat on a rocky outcrop were some seals. As the weather was good, Tim and I headed out in the dingy to see what images and videos I could create.

It is fair to say, photographing from a dingy was much harder than I had thought it was going to be! We have a smallish dingy which is filled with the battery used to power the electric motor so manoeuvring around inside the boat and trying to get low and rest the lens on the side of the dingy was very hard, then include the swell, wind and waves, and you have a very unstable platform to work from.

To start with, we were caught in the waves and swell a bit, so my first images were, well, unusable!

After a while I go into the swing of it and with the help of Tim plonking us behind the rocks, we were out of the worst of the waves. This made photographing a whole lot easier, and I am really happy with how some of them came out.

I cannot say the same of my video clips though! You need to watch the YouTube video for the full effect but, I will not be called up for any film work on nature documentaries anytime soon!

Arisaig wasn’t the only location where we saw seals, they popped up all over the place on our trip, however I had a magical morning later in the trip, where I woke up to a colony of seals hauled out on some rocks opposite the boat.

I think I was on deck photographing these beautiful animals for over an hour, watching them as the loch levels dropped, and I got some images that I am super happy with.