Back to the Harbor

The fantastic folks down at the Santa Barbara Sailing Center (sbsail.com) asked me back to make approximately 20 images for their website and other promos. Not only architectural photos, but also a few lifestyle shots and many many boat photos. Like I said before, is there any better place to be than the Santa Barbara Harbor as the sun goes down? I don't think so. For this particular image we spent several hours arranging boats, shuffling chairs, and adjusting lights before we settled in to make our final images as the sun went down. Sounds easy right? However...........anyone who knows anything about photography at this time of day knows how long the exposures can get. What started out at about 1/2 second exposure quickly shifted to 4sec, then 8 seconds, then 20seconds.......... No big deal - I have the sturdiest tripod in the world.............. Unfortunately, no tripod in the world could keep the boats in the frame from bobbing up and down with every passing boat or the dock from twitching if anyone took a single step. The photos were a blurry mess. I immediately cleared the docks of people and pulled off a few other tricks to get the boats to appear mostly still (i left a little motion for emotion). What appears to be one magical moment in time in fact took about 15 magical moments in time combined on the computer to recreate what we actually saw. All good fun - in fact the whole two weeks we worked down there was a blast. Huge thanks to Skip, Jen, Arianna, Kendall, and everyone else at the Sailing Center.