View From The Roadside

Queen Victoria Panorama, originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

Cunard’s new cruise ship, the Queen Victoria arrived in Southampton Docks on Friday before a naming ceremony and her departure on her maiden voyage. There were a number of things connected to the whole event around Southampton this weekend, so I knew she was going to be in and might be something to think about photographing.
I do have a fascination with shipping on the Solent, from the Navy in Portsmouth, to the tankers in Fawley to the container and cruise ships in Southampton. Up to now the only place I’d found with a view to the Docks was from the marina in Hamble, which is great for the usual Cunard berths at the QE2 Terminal but not much use for anything else. I’d assumed the military port in Marchwood would have blocked any decent viewing point of the main berths, where the rest of the cruise ships come into and where the Queen Victoria was, but hadn’t really had a good look around in daylight to be certain. It turns out I was wrong, and there are in fact places in Marchwood where you can get down to the waterfront and see across to the docks. I’ll remember that for the future.
Having found the place, my first problem was discovering that I had lost my little spirit level that is so invaluable taking any picture with water in it. It wasn’t too big a problem though, with plenty of other straight lines to help me out. There really isn’t much scope for artistic experimentation when taking pictures of ships. They pretty much are what they are, which is more than impressive enough anyway. I did try a few things, one of which was various shots of a Patrol boat as it passed by the ship. The last of those quick shots had the bow of the Queen Victoria as the backdrop, and I had a brainwave. A panorama shot of the ship, giving far more detail than a single shot could manage. I didn’t know it then, but that was where I slipped up a little. The last shot of the patrol boat wasn’t quite as focused as it could have been, probably due to rushing to get the picture as it moved along, but I didn’t take a fresh shot to replace it for the panorama. I’ll ruin the picture for you now, but if you look closely, you will see that the front section of the boat, from the front mast forward, is a touch soft.
Other than that, AutoStitch has done a wonderful job of the blend, giving a massive 20+ megapixel shot with enough detail that you can actually see people sitting at tables in the bar/restaurant in the top-middle section. I’ve put the full thing on flickr, so make sure to follow the “all sizes” links and view the original file. I’m new to these panorama shots, and this one wasn’t planned at all, so perhaps it would have been a better move to wait for the evening to darken a bit to bring out the lights on the ship better. I did that, but only with the more normal single shots, I didn’t try for another panorama later on. This is only the second one of these that has even worked, so hopefully I’ll learn some lessons from this one and the next one will be better again, the first lesson being that this stuff can work at all, and when it does, it’s well worth the extra effort.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 7:06 pm and is filed under About Pictures. 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.