I love watching the cargo ships floating by on the Danube river and for a long time I’d been plotting a way to capture these huge, rusty monsters. I got my chance on a rainy morning.

Preparations
I was fortunate enough to spot the ship approaching from afar, so I hadample time to precisely plan my shot. The place for the photo was fixed: standing at the foot of a bridge, I had little scope to move around. I only had my 50/1.8 lens with me, so I had to compose the image carefully - no possibility to zoom in or out. I had to make the most of the situation.

I wanted to put the ship in the lower third and dedicate the lower part of the image to its reflection, as the overcast weather ensured lovely saturated colors and great contrast, the ideal conditions for a nice reflection. The bridge pillars and the structure of the bridge gave a good geometric background to the approaching ship. Having found the appropriate spot for my photo, it was time to act.

Exposure
Because of the early morning gloom, I chose ISO400 and once again blessed my 350D for not giving me any noise grief with this setting. Another important parameter was the depth of field. I wanted a good sharp image of ship and bridge alike, so I chose a small aperture opening, f9.  Thanks to the high ISO speed, I could still use a shutter speed I could handle without motion blur, 1/200.

(I always shoot in full manual mode, as I feel this gives me the most flexibility to quickly and easily modify my settings. According to the moment, I might need to adjust the ISO, one minute later I might need a slightly different shutter speed and so on. M mode gives me the possibility to instantly doing these adjustments, sometimes half without thinking, as the light or scenery around me changes.)

And finally the moment of truth. The ship pushed throught the bridge pillars and showed its big, rusty, ugly face like some ancient dinosaur peeking out from between petrified trees. It was completely silent and so impressive that for one stopped heartbeat, I forgot abut photography and just stared, mesmerised, at it - but then I remembered what I was there for and took the shot. Thanks to the preparations, my fast camera and a bit of luck, the photo came out like I had imagined and planned. Preparing for the photo took about five minutes - one thousand times as much as the exposure itself.

Post processing
… was a fast business. I shoot RAW, so I could do most of the necessary tweaks in Canon’s own, excellent RAW editing software, Digital Photo Professional, or DPP in short. I slightly increased the contrast and adjusted the white balance to get the warm, yellowish colors I had seen on site. I only opened the file in Photoshop to resize and frame for the web.

This entry was posted on hétfő, július 6th, 2009 at 21:50 and is filed under English, The Making Of... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.