David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of the oceans and seas
I woke up at 05:00. We experienced heavy wind and waves all night. The aft deck was open, and even though it was still dark I could see some color in the clouds developing. Dawn and sunrise turned out to be “Some Kind of Wonderful”
Larger views of the images in the slide-show are available at my gallery.
“Charlie’s Angels” or “The Sunrise and Breakfast Club Photography Group” portrait taken while waiting for the sun to rise. The dawn colors are gone, and it is still 27 minutes until the sun is up. I normally don’t do people pictures, so they took me out of my comfort zone during the voyage to include people in my images. Composite of two images taken with a Leica T camera and 55-135 mm lens (ISO 500, 90 mm, f/4.4, 1/200 sec). You might ask, why is it a composite image? Rookie mistake doing people pictures. One image they all have their eyes open, but I cut off the feet. The other image they don’t all have their eyes open, but I did have the feet. There still are some artifacts from merging the images that need to be fixed.
Individual Images from the slide show can be viewed here.
Every day the sunrise at sea is different. It was a windy day, and we were traveling into the wind so the aft decks were safe. At the end of the day, after the sun set there were unique blue colors near the horizon caused by the earth’s shadow with pastel pinks above that are called the “Belt of Venus”. I have seen this before while camping in the mountains, but didn’t know the cause. I really wanted to see if I could capture the colors in an image since they are so subtle.
Individual images in the slide show are available here.
I never figured that I would used the Nikon 1 V3 camera to take panoramic images. Especially since I brought it along on the voyage with only one lens, a 70-300 mm VR telephoto zoom. Its sole purpose was a much smaller and lighter weight system for bird and other wildlife photography so I would not need to lug around a much heavier DSLR camera and even heavier 80-400 mm telephoto zoom lens. The down side was the Nikon 1 V3 system has a smaller and more noisy sensor. During the voyage, I perfected a method to use this camera to take panoramic images. I had been using the in camera panorama mode of the Fuji X-T1, but didn’t like the fact that it only took jpg images and stitched them together in the camera. The method I developed with the Nikon 1 V3 camera uses the continuous burst mode (20 frames/second) coupled with a relatively fast shutter speed (1/250 second). I would focus the camera, then holding the shutter button down smoothly rotate until the camera buffer is full. You can tell when the buffer is full when the camera stops sounding like a machine gun and returns to the normal click, click, click. The raw images are then stitched together via software (AutoPano Giga Pro). This sunrise image was created using this technique. It is a composite of 20 images. Click on the image to view a larger version. The full image is 15687 x 3428 pixels (equiv to 52.3″ x 11.4″ if printed at 300 dpi).
Individual images in the slide show can be viewed here.
It was a long day. I got up well before dawn, and got a silhouette image of the forward deck statue. Then a so, so sunrise image. In my cabin on the 8th deck was an oil painting, with a brass label and signature on the painting of Claude Monet. I asked one of the art history students if she could identify the painting and if it was the original or a copy? I didn’t really believe that it was the original, but the ship (MV Deutschland) when Semester at Sea wasn’t leasing it as the MV World Odyssey did have a lot of art work (paintings, statues, gold chandeliers, exotic woods, brass fittings, china dining ware, etc). When I got back home, I was able to do a Google image search, and found that it was indeed a painting by Claude Monet “Path Through the Corn at Pourville“. The original is listed as being in a private collection. For sunset, I set up a camera to do a time-lapse sequence on the forward upper deck, which I made into a video. There was a 1980’s disco for the faculty, staff, and life-long-learners (students not invited) in the faculty lounge/bar. To end the day I got an image of the constellation Orion while standing on a moving ship. The sensors on the new cameras are amazing, and can capture images in very low light situations. In the past, I would have had to use a much longer exposure where you would see the stars as jagged lines.
Individual images in the slide show can be viewed here.
