By an accumulation of factors (being 'volunteered', mainly), I will have a sampling cruise every month this spring. And despite the great number of JAMSTEC boats, every singly cruise will be aboard Tokyo University's Tansei maru. The one that moves a lot, smells bad, serves fish at every meal....
So to boost morale, Dhugal lent me a magnificient Canon reflex camera. This was, in theory, to photograph any large animals we should catch, while they were still alive, as you lose colours during formalin preservation, and often lose everything while preserving ctenophores.
I did, in fact, photograph one, and one only sample during the cruise, but it was a ctenophore. It happens to be a kind of ctenophore that preserves perfectly in formalin (it even still has yellow tentacles), but one needn't mention that!
But naturally before embarking on the Tansei as a pro jellyfish photographer, I though it wisest to practice a little around home. This proved to be an invaluable excercise, as remembering to turn the camera on, take the lense cover off and focus is a bit of a strain on my poor brain. Adding the flash, which also needs to be turned on, the pilot light waited for, and the camera set to 'flash' mode, was a bit more than I felt at ease with.
Leaving the flash for now, I set out into wildest Oppama to find me some photo subjects! These were not difficult to find, as spring is making its way slowly but surely into the landscape!
And this allowed me to test the camera to full extent: the superb macro lense,
which also has some drawbacks: if the cat is stropping against your legs, he's too close to photograph....
.... and you can't zoom!
Having mastered at least the basics of such a nifty camera, it is with high hopes and much enthousiasm that I set forth aboard the dreaded Tansei maru. It is at this point that things got worse.
The weather, which had been showing definite promisses of spring, decided it might be racing into things a bit too fast, and gifted our week of cruising with dreary, windy and wet February weather.
So windy, in fact, that the sea was too rough for us to safely navigate, and so we spent the whole week either hiding or racing ahead of a gale, towing nets kind of as an afterthought, whenever the captain thought we would have enough time. This produced rather desastrous results, the nets being few and far between, and the animals we did catch so beaten up that it was quite hard to find anything worth keeping, not to mention photographing!
So we fell back upon fishing, I mean, we performed nekton sampling, ...
They did actually catch some nice mackerel, of which they made sushi.
... and looking at the birds! For birds there were! Seagulls, small petrels, and even some albatross!
And believe me, had I tought to pack a change of batteries for the flash, there would be many many more bird photos.
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