Cruise ship shooting

[Frank Petronio]

If you can afford an expensive cruise, then you can afford one of these:

http://www.ken-lab.com/

(You can also rent them in big cities or from their website. It's $450 per month for a mid-level one and you can apply it towards purchase.)

They are quite common for aerial photography, especially from helicopters which vibrate a lot. One fellow -- Diane Arbus's former assistant -- Neil Selkirk -- uses one of their gyros with a Rolleiflex to shoot one-second long handheld exposures that are still sharp.

I've always wanted to try that....

I wish they could give me a commission lol.

[John Kasaian]

Well, if you've got a wood camera and the ship sank, it'll float!

[r.e.]

I am more interested in shooting the ship itself.

If you intend to do this with a large format camera on a tripod, I would be sincerely interested in the results of your attempt.

[wclavey]

I'm sitting here on what could be equated with an extremely large ship stuck to the seafloor (an oil drilling platform), watching the wave patterns in my coffee cup. I don't notice the vibrations at all, but my coffee cup tells me they are present anyway.

Likewise, I have never been on a cruise ship, but when I worked in Tankship Operations, I spent my time on Ultra-Large Crude Carriers (512K DWT, 1898 ft long, ...really large) and even on them, there was vibration that you felt, especially when under way...the combination of the engines and the sea. Perhaps the sleek shape of a cruise ship (or even a navy vessel) compare to a ULCC reduces the sea vibrations, but the engines will always be there. I confined my off-hours personal photography to hand held 35mm and MF, and there was no evidence of vibration then.