8th December, 2021

Late on Wednesday night I was presented with a real photography challenge; shooting these two vessels at anchor just off our balcony but sitting in an inky void of black; in reality, much darker than shown here, there being no visible light reflected from the shore even with eyes fully adjusted to darkness.

Now add two moving targets so no chance of a truly low shutter speed to help matters. For the same reason, no chance of a five image High Dynamic Range composite either to cover all the bases from pitch darkness at one extreme to the brightness of a naked bulb at the other.

Careful experimentation and years of experience was the answer, this including a lesson learned a long time ago from theatre photography of timing shutter release with the split second of minimum movement – in this case, watching how each vessel was reacting to the swell and shooting the image when both were briefly paused in unison.  The camera was a great help with this because I was able to set the viewfinder to act like battlefield night vision goggles, greatly amplifying image brightness and without having to use the rear panel display that would have ruined my natural night vision for both eyes.

With a rock-steady tripod and locked gimbal, the result of good timing was being able to get away with an exposure of 1/3 second – absurdly slow for a maritime target on water.  The resultant raw file was processed in DXO PureRaw to clean up digital noise, and then in Adobe Lightroom lifted two stops of exposure and cropped to 16:9 aspect ratio.

That was it.  Like when decorating, the real work was in the preparation.

As an aside; there is a saying that the best camera in the world is the one you have with you – and for most people, most of the time that’s a smartphone.  For most shots, it’ll work with acceptable quality and the emergence of computational photography now allows these devices to start capturing great shots that would not even have been a pipe dream just a few years ago. 

To put this image in to perspective though, click the thumbnail below to see what my Samsung S10 made of the same scene.  I am sure that in years to come smartphones will continue to improve but for now at least, the difference is stark and the technological powerhouse that is a Canon R5 (and some computational photography with the noise reduction software), deeply impressive.

Steve