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Pining for the fjords - NOT!
Liz and I are on a cruise up the coast of Norway, calling at various ports along the way. Part of the cruise has us going up the huge Nordfjord which is quite a surreal experience on a ship as large as a cruise liner.
Of course, it's drizzling away without a glimpse of sun in the sky. I can get this weather back at home in North Wales, I don't need to cross the North Sea to get cold and wet!
However, I'm not too upset, as the combination of plunging snow capped mountains and dramatic clouds is making for some epic photography.
So I'm huddled on a deck chair under a hot air vent trying to keep warm and keep raindrops off the camera lens. Every now and then I'll dash out from under cover, take a couple of shots and dash back again.
Photographing on board a moving ship requires a different technique to land based photography. Tripods are out so I've whacked up the ISO, engaged the image stabilisation and I'm keeping the aperture as large as possible all in the name of keeping the image sharp.
Exposure is a problem too. Normally I'd use an ND grad filter to retain detail in the sky, but doing so here would also darken the mountains to an unacceptable degree so I'm trying to fit as much dynamic range into one shot as I possibly can without blowing out the sky too much. Making multiple exposures is also out as there would be too much movement between the shots.
For this image I have to resort to a lot of post processing trickery to get what you see here. This final image is a far cry from the original raw file, but, to me, it brings out the drama of the scene and how I felt about it at the time much more forcefully that a straight interpretation would.
Filename - fjord 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 1/50sec @ f8, ISO200
Location - Nordfjord, Norway
This image - 640x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Image stabilisation used to prevent camera movement with hand held shot.
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