On day four in Rio we boarded the Star Princess and did our usual get-acquainted walking tour. This is a ritual we practice whenever boarding a new, unfamiliar ship. This is a great way to get to know the basic layout of any ship, identify its areas of interest, and helps keep you from getting lost later. I decided on this tour to bring you along by taking photographs with one of the two travel zooms I brought along for this trip.
The neat thing about using a small travel zoom is, even though they don’t take great pictures at ISO settings much above 200, you still don’t often need to use a tripod to take photographs in available light. My trick is to dial in ISO 100 or lower for maximum quality, select a two-second shutter release delay, find something upon which to perch the camera, compose the shot, and finally press the shutter release button. With no unsteady hand holding the camera and a rock-steady surface available, you can get some really stunning shots even with shutter release times of a quarter second or longer. You can’t do that using a straight hand hold, even with today’s best anti-shake technology. Well, you can, but that’s another lesson that we’ll get into at some future date.
Today’s photographs include many of the ship’s common areas including the Princess Theater (for live stage shows); the myriad bars located throughout the ship; the suspended, motorized walkway to the Skywalkers Nightclub; some of the specialty restaurants; the outdoor movie screen overlooking one of the ship’s four swimming pools; the glass-enclosed pool with motorized canopy; the casino; the three-story Atrium with its many shops and services areas; and of course our spacious balcony suite.
We really lucked out on that balcony suite, by the way. We had booked for a “guaranteed outside cabin” (that’s cruise line-speak for a small porthole in a cramped space one deck above the crew quarters) at a very affordable price. About two months before the cruise we were advised by Princess that we were being upgraded to a cabin with an obstructed view (that would be a much larger window with probably a really great view of the side of a lifeboat) on a higher deck. Then, just one week before departure date came word that we were being upgraded yet again, but this time to a balcony high up on Deck 12. No obstructed views way up there. It really does pay to book early sometimes.
Today we will finally depart, leaving beautiful Rio de Janeiro in our wake. All aboard time is 1:30 P.M., and the Star Princess is scheduled to set sail thirty minutes after that. Then it’s a day at sea before we reach Salvador, Brazil. As such, I’ll be giving the blog a rest tomorrow and will hopefully have some interesting photographs of Salvador to post the day after.
Now, as promised, here are those photographs of the Star Princess:
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R. Doug Wicker — Author 