“You pay your money, and you see your show.”

The story here is that of the gatekeepers (and, perhaps, of capitalism and tourism and a few other -isms). Some very large vessels move through the Intracoastal Waterway where I live. Those boats (if you can call them as such – they are often more like moving warehouses on the water) appear periodically during the day and offer some wonderful opportunities.

I wanted a very light, over-exposed shot to help allude to the scene of a bright summer day. As the ship was coming through the channel, I started focusing and noticed through the viewfinder the pay-per-use binoculars. Instead of waiting for the ship to move past the obstruction, I quickly decided the image would tell more of a story with the binoculars in the shot. As you can see, the binoculars became the main focal point of the story.

I decided to open the aperture a tad more to put the ship into the realm of bokeh, but still in focus enough to easily distinguish that it was a large vessel on the water. With the significant distance between the binoculars and the ship, f/8.0 gave me the depth of field I wanted. Overall, this helped me tell the story of the binoculars – if you want to see the boats out on the water, you’ll need to step up and pay your 50 cents.

With the aperture at f/8.0, the ISO of 100 meant a shutter speed of 1/80 second for the metering I wanted. I was okay with that speed, as it would give a bit more softness to the ship and water (which was going to be slightly out of focus due to the aperture).

With those decisions in place (and the ship quickly moving down the channel), all that was left was to lock focus on the binoculars, recompose the shot for textbook rule of thirds (binocular post on a vertical third, boat and water line on a horizontal third), and release the shutter. Post-processing was mostly left alone with the exception of slight desaturation of the colors (to assist the bright summer day idea).

EXIF data

Canon 5D Mark ii body, Canon EF 70-200mm L f/4.0 IS USM lens

Exposure: 1/80 second

Aperture: f/8.0

ISO: 100

Focal length: 144mm

Manual exposure mode, Auto white balance mode

Strobist data: none