Sailing (and flying) over Cape Ann

With the right weather conditions there’s nothing more visually stunning than flying over an interesting section of coastline. Luckily enough, Boston and the surrounding area has some great coastline from the North Shore down to the Cape. This picture was taken while flying around Cape Ann. More specifically it was taken while I was flying over Thatcher Island where the famous twin lighthouses are located. This yacht was sailing between Thatcher Island and the Gloucester coastline and was in the perfect position for me to get this shot. I was particularly concerned with getting the reflection of the yacht in the water which was possible because of the calm seas, position of the sun and some very thin cloud cover. At this point I was at about 1500ft and was shooting with my 70-200mm lens set at 190mm with the exposure set to -1EV (1 f stop). When shooting boats with white sails it is important to shoot at minus 1 stop so as to not blow out the sails themselves. This is due to the dynamic range of such a picture where the ocean is relatively dark and takes up most of the picture and the sail (in bright sun) is extremely bright. So the full exposure for this image was 1600th/second at f2.8 (-1EV) and ISO set to 200. For those not used to shooting from a plane the shutter speed may seem a little excessive but when compensating for the movement of the yacht, the movement of the plane and the vibrations always present in the plane anything less than 1000th/second does not guarantee a tack sharp image.

Beach on Half Moon Quay, Belize

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.