The Coral Isles – days ten and eleven

Well, we might not be home yet, but really, it’s like it’s all over already.
Just 2 days of straight sailing back to Sydney.
Bit of a downer, really.
Again, with nothing but 360 degree views of open water, there was little point in bringing out the camera.
Spent most of the time standing on Promenade Deck (that’s deck 7, the one that circumnavigates the entire ship) watching the flying fish and the bow wash, thinking about everything we’d experienced in the previous week and a bit.
Day eleven saw us in the company of a few birds. Obviously getting closer to land. Still a couple of hundred k’s offshore, but I guess for some of these birds, that isn’t that great a flight. Or maybe they sleep on the water at night? Maybe they don’t need to find dry land?
These were the kinds of things I was kicking over in my head to save me from having to think about going back to work.
When I awoke at 6:30 on the 29th, we were already at King Street Wharf, which was both surprising and disappointing.
I’d have liked to have been up on deck as we came through the heads, and to see whether the sunrise might have been worth shooting.
Oh well, the final injustice, I guess.
All in all, it was a fantastic trip, and the crew aboard the Sun Princess were absolutely fantastic. They couldn’t do enough to help you out with whatever you needed.
We will certainly be cruising again in the future.
If I do have one negative thing to say, it would be this:
As much as I loved the holiday, the area in which it let me down the most was as a photographer.
Now sure, some of you will look at the photos and say “What the hell is he whingeing about? The photos look great.”
Well, thanks! I’m glad other people like them too.
But here’s the thing.
Photography is not about subject matter.
It’s about LIGHT.
You can photograph the most beautiful icons of the world (think the Eiffel Tower, or the pyramids, Machu Picchu, or whatever you like) in crap light, and they just look like ordinary tourist snaps.
Or you can take the most ordinary subject matter and with the RIGHT LIGHT (plus of course, good composition and technical mastery), create an image that sticks in people’s minds forever.
And therein lies the problem with a cruise.
Any photographer worth his salt knows that the best light is early morning and late afternoon.
But on a cruise, you don’t pull into a port until 8 o’clock in the morning (generally) so you’ve missed the nice morning light.
And you’re back on the ship ready for departure by 16:30, which means you miss the nice evening light, too.
And night time photography? Forget it! You’re out at sea, sailing off to the next port.
So what you get is 8 hours in the harsh, broad daylight to shoot a location you’re unfamiliar with, and you generally don’t know the best locations to go and shoot because you’ve never been here before.
So when you DO find something worth shooting, you have to make the most of the light as it happens to be there and then.
You can’t think “Mmmm, this looks good. Think I’ll come back at 6 o’clock tomorrow morning” or “…think I’ll come back at sundown”, because by then, you’re either somewhere else, or rapidly headed that way.
As one photographer mentioned to me a couple of days ago, “It’s a bit like shooting a wedding then?”
Yep.
Pretty much!
This is your light. Do with it what you will.
And hey, if that’s the worst thing there is to say about a ship cruising holiday, then what are you waiting for?

Take me to: <- Day nine