Figure 1 -“Dory, Salem, MA.” (c) DE Wolf 2014.

I wanted to post this morning another image that I took at the National Maritime Historic Site in Salem, MA on Sunday.  They have a beautiful reconstruction of an East Indiaman, Friendship that I was photographing.  It is easy to lose yourself in the beauty of the rigging and the masthead.  But I often find that the best photographs are in the details and not where you expect them to be, but more often at different angles and from behind.  This picture I took from as close to water level as possible, by descending the boat launch until my feet were just short of in the water, where I was crunching the dried poppers on the cobblestones. I was interested not in the ship itself but in the dory and the ladder.

This photograph for me is all about composition – like an etude.  I spent a good deal of time composing it. And was happy when the necessary image cropping proved to be minimal.  The goal was to capture the stillness, intensity, and high contrast of a warm summer’s day, where the light was so strong that it made you squint. There was a strong breeze, seen here as the glistening ripples on an otherwise calm surface.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 109 mm, ISO 800, Aperture-Priority AE at 1/125th sec at F/16.0 with no exposure compensation.