A Saturday night on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor is always a treat, especially on a boat directly across the water from one of the city’s premiere music venues. Pier Six is that venue, and pier 5 is a pretty good perch to view the happenings from. Saturday night’s “Pink Floyd Experience” marked the end of the concert season and it was a stellar performance. Aurally you wouldn’t have known it wasn’t the real Floyd, and visually it was pretty good too.
I didn’t concentrate on photographing the performers. I tried to do that earlier in the summer when Crosby, Stills and Nash were there, only without the benefit of telephoto lenses (a stunning lack of foresight on my part. All I’d been thinking about was “boat” and it didn’t seem like a promising platform for a long lens at night. I was wrong – as solid ground was just a matter of stepping off the boat.) On Saturday the sun set early and I wasn’t sure there would be that much to shoot, but I did come with my camera and tripod.
Much of the early part of the concert was spent off the boat, walking up Pratt Street to meet my daughter Wynnie who had parked some distance away, and hunting down more libations to bring back to the folks on board. So unlike the CS&N event earlier in the summer, this was fully a night-time experience.
The last time I managed to take some nice dusk shots of the harbor and folks on board Ken Valentine’s boat. And since I’m a die-hard people as well as a location photographer, after sampling the visual surroundings and doing a little video on Saturday night my mind inevitably turned to the question of whether it would be possible to shoot any faces well, solely by the ambient light from around the harbor.
Thanks to the color capability of digital imaging, it worked very well. I adjusted the white balance in camera using a gray card and then shot from a tripod, as shutter speed was too slow to handhold the camera. The second image below is a jpg straight from my camera, unprocessed except for sizing to fit this blog. Skipper Ken, my daughter Wynnie and other guests were elsewhere when this was taken, but this image shows what is possible even at nighttime using careful technique. Technical data: ISO 1600, 85mm 1.8 Nikkor AF lens at f2.5, exposure 1/6 second, no flash, time of photo 9:58 pm.
The first photo below was taken earlier in the evening and gives an idea of the ambient light and surroundings that prevailed. Full disclosure – the rendition here was made from three separate exposures of the same scene, layered and selectively masked in Photoshop to expand the dynamic range of the final image.
The remainder of the photos are from the evening of the Crosby Stills and Nash concert early in July. The shot of CS&N on stage was cropped from a wider shot, and fortunately remains sharp enough for them to be recognizable. Special thanks to Ken Valentine and his wife Patsy (fifth photo below), extraordinary hosts who welcomed us all as guests on their boat.
Great photos showing off the splendor of the harbor, a place that was special to me even before the upgrade. Almost 50 years ago, I was stationed in the Army at Ft. Meade, Md., and enjoyed taking the bus in to Baltimore for walks at the harbor. I am glad that it has been spruced up and that you have captured some of the joy there.