When a boat take photos
One month ago I joined two whale watching boat tours to the sea round Skjervøy, one on 21 November, one on 27 November. Most of the time I was outside on deck to take photos.
Days were short and it became darker and darker soon. There are some options what you can do on a moving boat if you want to take photos but light is low. One of them is to use high ISO values. Depending on your camera this can result in a photo with a lot of noise.
Another one is to take your tripod with you and integrate the boats movements while taking photos with a long exposure. That’s what I did on the return passage of these boat trips. The exposure times of these photos lie between 10 and 13 seconds.
Two movements are caught in these photos. The large ones are created by the rolling and pitching of the boat. The small ones are caused by the vibrations of the motor.
While I mostly focussed on taking pictures to the side I almost skipped an interesting motive: the stern wave of the boat.
Some tips:
- Use a telephoto lens. It will magnify the movements of the lights.
- In wintertime take your warmest clothes with you. It can be colder on the boat than you might expect.
- Avoid the bow of the ship when waves get higher to avoid your camera equipment and yourself being soaked by breaking waves.
Here is a set of images I made on two Hurtigruten journeys some years before. You see less vibration, since the Hurtigruten ships are much larger.