the brief: get up in the middle of the night & photograph the Cunard cruise liner MS Queen Victoria as she passes by Rangitoto Island – with part of the client’s school in the foreground of the shot. this presented a small logistical problem as the ship was due to arrive over an hour before dawn – which means long exposure needed to see any of the landscape at all – but a moving object like a ship (even at that distance) turns into a set of blurred white lines on any exposure slower than 1/10 seconds.
solution? take two different photos, one of the ship at relatively fast speeds, and another of the scenery without the ship at about 40 seconds exposure, and combine them. and as it turned out, i got two ships for the price of one: because a freighter, dwarfed by the giant cruiser, followed it in to port…
