Anchored Sailboat

Anchored Sailboat

Two weeks ago I visited Changi Boardwalk and made a couple of night photographs and the above photograph is one of the them. I've always wanted to make night photographs of sailboats and fishing boats. Not the floating anchored types but I prefer those stationed along the seashore during low tide, be it in good conditions or in dilapidated states. They seem to draw my attention and I find them to be interesting subjects to make photographs of.

The sailboat in the above photo doesn't seem to be positioned in the right place but I still find it quite surreal with its surrounding environment and one malfunctioned street light pole along a pavement next to the boardwalk.

I made a vertical version with all subjects placed in the center frame and negative spaces on the top and bottom i.e. the cloudy night sky and the foreground boardwalk, as shown below.

By doing so, I enforce viewers to view the subjects first before they move their eyes to the night sky and then down to the foreground boardwalk. Well, the night sky looks interesting with a commercial airplane flew by creating that long thin streak of light trail right across. Pity there wasn't any plane by the time I made the landscape oriented version.

I chose the landscape version over the vertical because it has more form i.e. the tree and foliage coming down from the top right frame forming a slight 'S' curve, down to the anchored sailboat and the weeds-obscured banner that probably reads "OPEN TO PUBLIC". Followed by the malfunctioned street light which I light-painted it in red, to symbolise a warning beacon. The pavement that runs diagonally across the bottom frame also leads viewers to the "beacon".

I included the window of a house on the far left frame, internally lit by in-house tungsten light just to make the photograph more interesting. As if there's a story to tell about the house, its occupiers and the sailboat. I did a little light-painting on the dark shadow fence and pavement beyond the street light, to bring out enough textured details.

The main light source came from behind the camera right, about 10 meters away. The bright cool white street lights swept across a wide area and illuminated the subjects with the right amount of tensity to make this photograph possible without any further light-painting. A total of 25 seconds to attain this result.