Sail with New Freebooters

I believe I’ve done just enough photography to understand what makes a good picture, and what you have to do to get it. I’ve even managed to take one or two exciting pictures with modest, and in some cases ancient, equipment, and I can do some basic manipulation with Photoshop or The Gimp.

However, I am a long way from producing the kind of image that top professional yachting photographers do. For a start, I can’t afford their lenses or even the camera bodies they put behind them, and it would take a whole season before I was confident enough to use such equipment in anger. Sports and wildlife photographers need similar lenses, but yachting photographers must surely be the ones that submit them to the harshest conditions.

Many, many years ago I chatted to Eileen Ramsay, who made her name with black & white photos of dinghy racing taken with a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera from just above water level, hanging from her neck by its strap as she leaned over the side of an open boat. She and her partner (who specialised in medical photography) used to strip and clean her cameras after each shoot, to get rid of the salt spray.

I don’t know any of the modern generation of boat photographers, but I do know that the equipment they use costs more than the RIBs they often use to put them where they want to be. I sometimes suspect that their cameras spend as big a percentage of their lives in the maintenance shop as an Air-Sea Rescue helicopter does. If you add in the fact that these photographers often use helicopters and light aircraft to get some of their pictures, you can’t really complain about the prices they charge.

I can’t imbed any photos here - let me give you links to a few favourites instead:

Amory Ross

A collection of the work of various photographers, from www.boston.com

A panoramic photo of Jean le Camm’s Bonduelle by Dennis Gliksman.  OK. So you start with a panoramic tripod head, but what about the view of the deck below the camera position? That means re-rigging the tripod and head to one side and getting the images registered correctly with the rest of them. Getting the exposures matched for all the components of the pic isn’t simple, either - for a start, you need to shoot all the images before the lighting changes. A far cry from those simple stitch-up landscape jobs you may have tried.

All other things being equal, there is no substitute for professional-quality photographic equipment  in the hands of someone who knows how to use it.