Onboard Photography

Boot Key Harbor, Marathon, Florida.

Last night we heard commotion in the water next. To the boat. We looked just in time to see a big fish jumping with a dolphin right behind him. The dolphin swallowed the fish in mid air. I was not fast enough with my camera to shoot the picture, but if I did it would have looked like this.

As you can imagine, we see a lot of very photogenic scenes living on board a boat. It frustrates me that I am unable to capture more of them to add to the blog. No doubt I could do better given enough time, effort and money. But there are three obstacles that I think I could not overcome.

1. Speed. As in the dolphin shot above, many scenes are action shots that require lightning fast photography. I would need expensive equipment always at the ready to have a chance at those shots. In real life, I would be dropping that expensive equipment overboard several times per year.
2. No stable platform. Many scenes I see would require long time exposures at night. Even on still nights, the boat moves and my pictures look like this.

3. High zoom. This morning before dawn, the tip of the crescent moon nearly skewered Venus near pink clouds. Very pretty. But when I shoot it with my camera, the moon looks like a tiny dot. I would need extreme zoom to et some of those shots, meaning big heavy lenses which leads back to problems 1 and 2.

Maybe technology will solve all these problems for me, but I am not holding my breath.