This is an island called Half Moon Quay just off the coast of Belize. Unlike most of the photographs I take, this was taken with an “old fashioned” film camera. While I did own a digital camera at the time my access to electrical outlets was going to be limited so I decided to use a manual camera. The camera I used is a Nikon FM and the only battery required for this camera is for the light meter. While I made sure I had a spare battery for the light meter, I had left it in my hotel room the day I went to Half Moon Quay. This also happened to be the day that the battery decided to die! So I was at an amazing place with a manual camera and no light meter.
However, I remembered that noon sun should be around 250th and F8 with a 100 ISO film so I took this as a starting point. With the sun at my back I knew I would get good color saturation and was in a good position to use a polarizer. Depending on how I set the polarizer I knew I would use 1 or 2 stops so I decided to go with 125th at f8 with the polarizer. I was using Fuji Velvia film and with a scene like this where the dynamic range is pretty consistent throughout the picture I knew if I was a stop or two off that I would be OK. The result you see is a scanned slide that has had some contrast tweaks applied but the exposure was pretty well bang on.
