Cape Banks and Long Bay - Pelagic Excursion

Last year I was blessed with some seriously good winter storms, nothing better than a cold winter morning with a solid south easterly when you are out trying to get a photo of an albatross or two. This year has been very disappointing when it comes to albatross sightings, it seems I never really got the combination of weekend and strong onshore winds.


Back in the beginning of September, however, a single weekend seemed to be decent i.e. weather so rubbish that the birds would not expect any human being foolish enough to be standings exposed on the cliffs, so there was a chance those pelagic winter visitors would relax and drift close to shore hopefully getting inside Bigma range.

Cape Banks did not deliver any albatrosses this September weekend, but I managed to finally get decent views of a few Hutton's Shearwaters passing by, they were a first for me :-)

Conditions were pretty rough and I decided to retreat. Furthest out on the cliffs around Long Bay an abandoned military observation post gives good shelter when all other options are too extreme and with nothing else on I opted for a few hours out in the "shed".

The shearwaters were flying too far away from the coast to allow for identification, but quite a few terns came in literally flying straight above me and a nice surprise was a juvenile Pacific Gull hanging around. Earlier this year I saw my first ever Pacific Gull in Long Bay, few weeks before seeing hundreds of them down in Wilson's Promontory.

All good - after a day like that you feel proud to have been outside, just make sure to wash some of all that saltwater spray of the camera and it will all be fine :-)

Long Bay - Pacific Gull

I could start this blog post exactly like the previous, where I rattled on about how a short 10 minuets drive down along the coast can give you more new ticks than 4 days of hard(?) birding far far away from Sydney. Less than a week after our La Perouse trip, we decided to give Long Bay a go - Long Bay being even closer to home than La Perouse, surely there would be no ticking action going on, but I have come to like the walking in the area down there and there was a breeze from south east - the right direction, but to be honest nowhere near strong enough for a real pelagic excursion.

Soon after we had parked the Magna and started walking the very large gull in the first picture past us flying along the rocky shore and it looked like it was looking for somewhere to land! The Australian selection of gulls is very limited (if you do not count the six or so rare vagrants) there are only three in the club: The Silver, Kelp and Pacific Gulls. Silver is hard to avoid, Kelp is around if you look for it, but Pacific is hard to find around Sydney - it is much more common down south, but we had not seen it at Ben Boyd and here we were back home in Sydney with an enormous gull very much looking like a juvenile Pacific Gull cruising around in our backyard!


The gull had landed down on a hard-to-get-to rock platform, but the need for a confirmation picture gave us wings .. or rather enhanced crawling capabilities :-) As soon as we got a closer look, there was absolutely no doubt that we had indeed bagged the Pacific Gull, not bad for a Wednesday afternoon.

After a bit of celebration(?) we continued our walk out towards the usual sea bird lookouts at the cliff top. As expected the weather was not rough enough to push the passing shearwaters in towards the coast and into range of the Bigma - if you wait long enough you will always get a few reasonable pictures, but nothing compare to the amount of close vicinity action that happens on a good stormy winter day along the coast .. a few months and there will hopefully again be a bit of albatross action on the blog.

Great afternoon trip to Long Bay, very exciting once again seeing a new bird! I had already planned another Victoria trip where I would be (nearly) certain to see the Pacific Gull, but there is something special about being surprised and seeing birds where you did not expect to see them.
We had been out a few days earlier trying to get pictures of the Sooty Shearwater slightly further down along the coast. In these economically unstable times I have decided to save the price of an entirely new blog post by including a few pictures from that trip here in the end of the Long Bay endeavor. These are handheld, but of fair quality - considering the distance. This winter I should probably give my monopod one more chance - I seriously did not like using it last winter, but I guess it is a question of giving it a fair go and if it can give me a stop or two it could dramatically reduce noise in these sea bird pictures where I usually have to crop quite hard to get something usable.

The Arrival of Big Al :-)

My dad arrived :-) Not bad at all! His arrival was the starting signal to a well orchestrated 3.5 weeks of excitement ... and probably also the main reason for the pathetic amount of postings hitting the blog lately ;-)

Using the first few days to get the jet-lag under control we kept the action happening in the vicinity of Coogee where we visited a few of the good old favorites. As always it is fantastic to realize how much is happening outside your door if just you make it out there.

Took a few trips up and down along the cliffs of the Eastern suburbs. The picture above is a panorama of Magic Point - a location that has indeed proven quite magic for those who are out looking for Grey Nurse Sharks or a bit of BW'ing. If you click the picture you will get a high resolution version to enjoy.
The wind was wrong for BW'ing and only having two sets of snorkel and mask we decided to just enjoy the views and tick a few whales swimming south :-)


Not having planned to go north during my dad's stay we conveniently also ticket a couple of "Sydney-crocodiles" lying sunning themselves on a rock before going hunting for ... flies.

Final achievement of the first couple of days was to get my dad well and truly hooked on fish and chips, indeed a very easy task, that would give us much happiness during the next few weeks :-)

Another Long Bay Excursion

I have been busy doing non-blog'able things lately and have not been able to pack as much action into my weekends as I would have liked to. However, living at the coast gives the possibility of getting into something that feels like nature in very short time and I have tried taking advantage of that - unfortunately my underwater camera has become very unreliable and if my last tweaks do not help I am afraid it will have to spend the rest of its life on land.

Being restricted to land-based photography I took of to good old Long Bay. Despite having visited it over and over again there is always a surprise or two hiding along the cliffs down there ... and if not, you will have to make one yourself :-)


I nearly always find myself at Long Bay towards the end of the day, probably because it gives the most fantastic lighting conditions imaginable! The sun going down in the west and the cliffs facing east out towards the ocean gives an amazing play between light and shadow ... and a welcome excuse for testing out the HDR capability of camera and software.


HDR photography: Stacking five raw files taken with -2,-1,0,+1 and +2 stops of compensation means that you expand the dynamic range of the resulting photo i.e. you keep information in the shadows as well as in the highlights. Afterwards you can play around and try to compress all that info into a conventional jpg file by performing a tone mapping step ... Depending on how hard you push those sliders you can end up with something that categorize everywhere between normal and freaky :-D ... Unfortunately, stacking five pictures also mean that it becomes very clear just how dirty your lens or sensor is - looks like I need a go with a bit of soap and water to clean that old camera of mine ;-)

Sometimes though the light is just right and you do not need fancy software to manipulate anything. Tip of the day is to visit Long Bay just as the sun is disappearing and shoot those golden cliffs.

Fish Photography with the Bigma? :-)

Before jumping in the water at Clovelly, we had seen a Black-browed Albatross passing probably less than 50 meters from the shore. So after our dip and a second breakfast we decided to test our luck at the cliffs around Long Bay.

It all started out very normal a steady stream of various feathered wildlife was passing by and little G had already started ticking.

Small fish are eaten by bigger fish ... and more or less everything else as well! In addition to the underwater dangers throw in a bit of peril from above; albatrosses, gannets and a few thousand gulls and you know how dangerous it is to be little fish :-) Moving towards the clifftops we could see at least two large collections of seabirds preying on bait balls, one of them a few hundred meters from shore, but the other in range for a few pictures.

The feast slowly moved closer to the coast and we were able to see the predators attacking from below.

We talked to a couple of spear fishers standing evaluating the situation. Apparently the waters just north of Long Bay is a superb spot for good size targets if you are equipped with a speargun ... and do not mind the odd shark measuring you up ;-)

Great guns! It seems that there is always something happening out there when you get your lazy bum of the sofa :-)

Have started considering buying a new lens! I obviously need something wider than 50mm at some stage ... I guess(?) But imagine how exciting it would be to do a bit of macro photography! :-) Tempted by the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 for the wide end and the Sigma 150mm f/2.8 macro for the small stuff.

Good Quality Relaxing in Long Bay

It is quite fantastic to have a "secret" spot only 5 minutes drive away from where you live, with albatrosses, whales and nature galore ... even producing a surprise tick once and a while ;-) All of this happening in a crowded city of 4.5M people and still you can sit alone recharging the capacitors with a million dollar view and not a soul around! :-)

It was all happening, a Nankeen Kestrel eating while on the wing - I have spared you for the pictures where it was getting bloody - and an Eastern Reef Egret performing on one of the rock platforms, great bird - and a new one for me!

The slightly more ocean going wildlife was in place as well, a few whales were heading North approximately a kilometer from the coast, at least 2 species of albatrosses were seen and I was lucky to get decent BIFs of some feathered wildlife flying close to shore.


Walking back after a couple of high quality hours I guess the mood got the better of me and turned a bit "arty" - sorry about that :-)

With a bit of help from the Nikon I even produced the HDR below, 5 raw images taken with one stop between combined and tone mapped trying to capture the sun setting behind Long Bay - in real life it was even better :-)

Long Bay, revisited