It’s all in the edit (part 2)

My previous post about the danger of editing ‘in the field’ as opposed to a more considered edit later in the computer seems to have been well received by many of you. Thank you to all who commented and tweeted and retweeted. As one commentator remarked, one wonders just how many ‘good’ images are lost through over-zealous use of the ‘delete’ button on the camera.

Here’s one image that thankfully didn’t get away from me, although it nearly got deleted!  I’ve been undertaking an ongoing documentary project on wild bottlenose dolphins over several years, and have been out in all weather conditions trying to capture a broad range of images of weather, light and animal activity. And on one particular Scottish summer day it was horrible. Overcast, cloudy, very cold and with stinging rain verging on the sleety sweeping in, luckily from behind me, so at least my very large lens was facing the other ‘sheltered’ way. But to work in these conditions I was wearing full waterproofs, and the camera was wrapped in a large plastic protector, rubber bands to seal the front and rear, with a small peep hole for me to peer through at the viewfinder. In truth most of the photography is done by a shotgun-style approach, keeping both eyes on the sea and whacking the lens around on the tripod when an animal appears and pressing the shutter release allowing autofocus to do it’s work. If one has one’s face in the viewfinder it’s impossible to predict where the animals will be and peripheral vision is restricted, so it’s better to look over the top, roughly aim and press the shutter release when anything appears.

And on this particular day there was a lot of action, but I could not figure out what was going on, the animals were up and down all over the place, fins appearing and disappearing, but I could not see any sign of fish – they often ‘play’ with their prey, salmon or mackerel, but there was no obvious flashes of silver, just lots of movement. I filled a card with shots and then realised that to change it in the downpour would be a time consuming pain, my wet hands sticking to my pockets, everything dripping, wind whipping salt spray and rain everywhere. So I decided to flip through the images and delete the ones that just contained empty water (I get lots of these), and after deleting a couple I thought, no, this is mad, I’ll get another bag over it all and get underneath, get the card out and change it. So I did, and it was a real pain as the bag tried to take off whilst I fought to restrain the whole voluminous thing from taking flight. But job done.

Dolphin frisbee! © John MacPherson

Later, at home with a hot drink in front of the computer I watched frame after frame after frame of empty grey sea flash up onscreen, and a fair number with lone fins just breaking the surface. And then one image caught my eye, something in the corner of the frame apart from a fin, something in the air. Magnifying the frame showed  a moon jellyfish in mid flight! The commotion I’d watched was not hunting as I’d thought, but play, and the dolphins were having a game of frisbee with a jellyfish!

And I had come so close to deleting this little bit of magic. Lesson learned!