There are a number of posters and books out on marine mammals but one of the best around is called ”A Guide to the Identification of the Whales and Dolphin of Ireland” by Jim Wilson and Simon Berrow. Jim’s drawings are excellent and very informative. It’s spiral bound with a blue cover and if I remember correctly the book was only about €12/€15. It’s a relatively new book, only a year or two old, so there should be lots of copies around.

If you want fish i.e. guides then you are probably looking at ”Great British Marine Animals” by Paul Naylor. It’s not very in-dept with the text or descriptions but the photos are excellent – especially for a beginner wondering what he/she just saw. A good reference to have in the car to put an end to the after dive arguments about who saw what and where.

A more detailed book would be ”Mediterranean and Atlantic Fish Guide” by Helmut Debelius which has a nice balance of photos and text – it’s dearer than Naylor’s and not quite as quick to use. There’s a whole series of Debelius guides for different parts of the world and all are good.

A more scientific book would be ”Marine Fish & Invertebrates of Northern Europe” by Moen/Svensen but a lot of the fish in this are Scandinavian and the photos aren’t always the very best.

And sorry about the links being to the German Amazon but it’s nice to see the price in real money :)

So I went next door to Currys and they showed me the camera, gave me the book so I could see the specs and let me play with it for a while. I was looking dubious so the guy said I could exchange it for a different camera if I didn’t like it. Perfect! So a sale of Currys at the expense of PC World all for the sake of plugging in a camera and leaving me look at it for 5 minutes.

Actually I got a few camera this year. I got an underwater camera and a video camera as well. All of them work perfectly in Linux. I’ve been using the Gimp and Picasso to edit the photos and the brilliant Kino to take videos from the camera.

The underwater camera also takes movies with sound underwater which is pretty cool. The picture quality isn’t the best but by messing with some of the settings I am getting them better and better. Pictures taken with a flash are perfect but that’s no use when I take it scuba diving as particles in the water will obscure the shot. Anyway I am sure I will figure it out.

If you are interested in looking at underwater pictures from Ireland check out the Cork Sub-Aqua Club.