Taking Better Boat Pictures

[jimh]

To get a good picture of your boat requires a bit of planning, good lighting, and some luck. Here are some ideas that may help get better pictures.

The boat should be prepared for its photo session. Remove all extraneous gear laying around the boat. Tidy up any lines. Arrange the seats. Check the position of the outboard engine. Make the boat as presentable as possible. There is no reason to take a candid picture of your boat when it is sitting on its trailer or tied to a dock. You have plenty of time to prepare the boat for photography.

Wait for good lighting conditions. Do not take pictures with the sun backlighting the boat and in the frame, unless you intentionally want to create a silhouette of the boat. Low sun angles just after sunrise or just before sun set are often the best lighting conditions. Take advantage of them. Try shooting at different exposure settings, trying under-exposing and over-exposing by one f-stop. This can often result in enhancement of the image quality. Of course, be sure to be in focus on the boat, not the background or a foreground object. Boats are usually longer than they are tall, so do not orient the camera for a portrait layout. Users of the iPhone and other rectangular smartphones, please take note of this. You are driving the rest of us crazy by shooting everything with the camera oriented 90-degrees from horizontal.

Vary the perspective on the boat. Some boat hulls look rather odd when viewed at certain angles; those hulls have particular sides or views that look much better. Try to use those angles.

Take more than one picture, changing the composition slightly or moving the camera position. It can be hard to see exactly what is in the view of the camera with a small viewfinder, and you may discover something distracting later that you overlooked. Take a lot of images. Then pick the best one.

Don't be afraid to crop the image. Not every scene has composition that fits perfectly into the pre-set aspect ratio of your camera's image sensor. Crop out extraneous material.

If you have skill with an image editor, you can also try various exposure compensation or color corrections. These generally require some skill and taste, so use them judiciously.

Here is an image of my boat that I took several years ago. I had to walk about a quarter-mile around the marina docks to get this perspective. I waited until the setting sun was just about to go below the tree line. The lighting was very good at this moment. The boat was reasonably tidy, although I see a couple of items I could have hidden. The framing of the boat in the overall image is good. The lower right part of the frame is a good location to direct the viewer's eye. In this image, that is where the Evinrude E-TEC engine is positioned. Although I took this image for my own use, it so happened that Evinrude saw the image and asked if they could use it in one of their in-house publications. I was quite honored to have my boat featured in their dealer magazine--on the cover!


The Boston Whaler boat CONTINUOUSWAVE at the seawall of the marina in Northport, Michigan.

[jimp]

Additionally, what do you want to emphasize in the picture? In this case, the engines.

[Binkster]

I think that outboards sitting vertically in their operating position are a better look.--rich

[jimh]

Here is another boat image taken with a very low sun angle. This one is from Killbear Marina, along the Georgian Bay Small Craft Route, near Parry Sound. I did a lot of work on this shot in Photoshop because there were many distracting elements in the background. Fortunately, the bushes in the background were easy to clone and use to replace the very rectilinear elements that were quite unnatural distractions.

Boston Whaler REVENGE 22 W-T Whaler Drive at H-Dock, Killbear Marina, Ontario.

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Notice that this angle of view tends to make the hull look shorter. Compare it with the first images of the boat I showed above. It is also unfortunate that the little breeze did not unfurl and stream the Canadian courtesy pennant flying from the radio mast, as it did for the U.S. flag on the stern.

By the way, the dock is a floating dock. The steps rise to the main fixed dock. As you can see, this was a year of high water, as the steps from the floating dock are above the fixed-height deck of the main dock.

[Jeff]

One of my favorite photos of all of my Whalers. That boat was just such a classy looking craft

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[Jeff]

Some of Don's 21

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[Jeff]

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[Jeff]

Some of Jim Dunlap's 21

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[Jeff]

This thread is timely Jim. I am making it a point to get a new DSLR camera and to start taking new photos this summer. Not just of my boat, but others as well. It's a passion I have that I need to start doing more of.

[Jeff]

Here is an image I shot from a far after dropping my Newport into White Lake in Montague Mi with my DSLR. I have often wondered what my son was thinking in this photo....I bet is about boating though.

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[Dutchman]

Great picture Jeff

[jimh]

Jeff--your photograph of the Boston Whaler from head-on at the dock demonstrates two very important aspects to consider when taking a photograph of your boat:

--capturing an unusual angle that shows a distinctive feature of the boat

--including a human in the photo for more human interest.

You image showing the bow-on view of the classic Boston Whaler smirked hull is excellent. It really shows the unusual design that is used with Boston Whaler, enhanced by the shadows cast onto the hull.

And, of course, your young son in the picture adds to the appeal. I suspect that in 50-years that photograph will be a family heirloom. That he looks out of frame at something we cannot see adds a bit of mystery to the image.

Also, the limited depth of field adds to the composition. The background is out of focus. I often cheat on this and blur the backgrounds in Photoshop. Your shot looks like it came out of the lens that way.

[jimh]

Jeff--your images of Don's OUTRAGE 21 demonstrate a couple of nice elements in good boat photography. The first picture was taken with a shutter speed that allows the water to become somewhat blurred--or maybe you did that in Photoshop. The blurring of the water enhances the image greatly by moving the eye to focus on the much sharper image of the boat. Of course, you need a digital camera that can give you shutter speed control to accomplish this in the camera itself, not to mention a steady hand on the camera when shooting a moving object with lower shutter speed.

The distorted overhead view of Don's boat with a very short focal length lens (or fisheye lens) is unusual. I think you might have darkened the edges of the image after exposure.

Third picture of Don and his boat on plane with shoreline in the background could be enhanced, I think, if you removed that tall tree that is in the background to the left. It distracts me from the boat and its pilot.

[jimh]

This thread is intended to be a tutorial or an demonstration of certain techniques regarding boat photography. It is not intended to be a supplement to the very popular "Show Us Your Whaler" thread.

Regarding good photographic composition, there is a nice tutorial on-line at

http://photoinf.com/General/NAVY/Photog ... alance.htm

which is a work of the government of the USA, actually by the Navy Department. It has very good fundamental rules to guide composition, in particular the notion of the "principle of thirds."