R. Doug Wicker — Author

The first stop on our fifty-four-day cruise last year was the port city of Gustavia on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy, or St. Barts (English) and St. Barth (French) as it is more commonly known.  Luckily, we arrived on Saturday, March 27, which happily coincided with the famous Bucket Regatta.  And lucky it certainly was, as I was able to capture some really neat shots of some of the yachts that were competing that year.  I don’t believe I’m exaggerating the least little bit when I say that there must have easily been well over a billion dollar’s worth of yachts in and around Gustavia that day.

There’s just something about the grace a beauty of a sailing yacht, and they truly make for some fun and exciting action shots.  Here are just a few examples of what we saw that day:

On a related note, St. Barts just happens to also be the first  port of call for The Globe, the cruise ship in my soon to be completed murder mystery.

Don’t let the title fool you.  There are few challenges greater for the amateur photographer than trying to capture the sights buried deep within Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico.

We left El Paso Wednesday for a road trip with our eldest (12-year-old) grandchild.  That evening we arrived at the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns in time for the bat flight at dusk.  Unfortunately, between the drought, brush fires, and lack of insects, this year’s migration of the Mexican Free-tailed Bats was one of the worst in recent memory.  And the bat flight on Wednesday evening was very poor.  Instead of the usual hundreds of thousands, I estimate we probably saw only a few hundred come out to feast on the tasty local flying insect population.

But is was Thursday’s scheduled descent into the caves that really drew us here this trip.  I’ve been going to Carlsbad Caverns since I was around nine years old, and over the years I’ve made this trek probably well over a dozen times.  This was my first attempt at capturing the vistas using a digital camera.  Past attempts were made with my old 35mm gear.

Flash photography simply won’t do in the caverns, although that doesn’t keep those who don’t know what they’re doing from trying it, much to my amusement.  To do it right, you really have to balance the camera on something (a tripod would be far to cumbersome on this outing) and resign yourself to taking long exposures (up to a second in some of these examples).

As for the choice in cameras, the sensor on a point-and-shoot is probably going to be too small to avoid the dreaded digital noise problem common with these cameras when using high ISO settings in dark conditions.  Thus, this time I went with my full-framed (35mm sized sensor) DSLR.  And since the large sensor on a full-frame camera is very tolerant of high ISO settings, I pushed to the limit on this photographic endeavor and took my Canon EOS 5D up to ISO 1600.  Don’t even think of trying that with most cameras, even most DSLRs.

So, no tripod and a park prohibition against even touching cave formations means you have to get really inventive.  But we’ve covered this problem before, albeit with a much smaller point-and-shoot.  On this shoot I was faced with balancing a very large camera and lens configuration that weighs upwards of three and a quarter pounds (nearly 1.5 kilos)!  Fortunately, the walkways are frequently lined not only with stainless steel railings (tubular, and thus useless here), but also with rock and cement “curbs” ranging in height from a few inches to several feet.  Finding reasonably level portions upon which I could place my camera proved to be remarkably easy.  Other shots were made using signage for balancing and bracing.

As for white balance, forget it.  I wasn’t even going to think of attempting beating the camera’s automatic white balance setting on this difficult lighting.  Thus, the pictures you see below have not been retouched in any manner other than minor tweaks in contrast, curves, and the occasional crop.  The colors, tint, and white balance are completely untouched.

For some fun, scroll you cursor over the pictures below for the titles.  One of them is an inside joke (image versus my “personal favorite”).  See if you can find it:

This island goes by two names:  Thera (or Thira) and Santorini.  It is the remains of a volcano that produced what is probably the fourth most powerful explosion in all of recorded history, an explosion that wiped out a civilization and decimated most of the known world at that time.  Indeed, the Minoan Eruption, as it is known, may be the genesis (pun intended) of the tales for both Atlantis and the Great Flood of Noah’s Ark fame.  Just how big was this explosion?  It was probably four times more powerful than the famed  Krakatoa explosion of 1883, and nearly on par with the Mount Tambora explosion in 1815.  All told, about 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of debris were blasted into the atmosphere.

Today, Sanorini is a quaint travel destination that has much to offer in the way of visually stunning sights and almost limitless photographic opportunities.  But it’s a tricky place to take photographs.  The colors that you see are often not the colors that come out of the camera.  That’s because there are two obstacles facing those who normally rely on their camera’s automatic settings, and both of those obstacles can be attributed to one of the very things that make Santorini so picturesque—the extensive use of whitewash on many of the buildings.

Exposure Control:  Whitewash reflects bright sunlight that fools your camera’s light sensor into thinking the scene is dimmer than it actually is.  Think snow.  All that reflected white presents much the same problem here, and is one which I covered before in a previous article.

Color Balance:  You would think that color balance would be a snap with all this white, but there’s a trap.  If the “white” object you’re photographing happens to be in shade, it will record with a distinctly bluish tint.  We discussed this before as well—white balance in shade versus direct sun.

To compensate, you’ll either have to correct things in post processing or, better still, get the picture settings correct to begin with.  That calls for two adjustments to the camera.  To correct for the tendency to underexpose, it’s best in this case to use positive exposure compensation somewhere between +⅓ and +1 full stop depending on the amount of white in the scene and how much of that white is reflecting direct sunlight back toward you.  But don’t go overboard here.  This isn’t snow blanketing the bulk of an entire frame; it’s white reflecting off an object or set of objects within a much larger scene.  As for white balance, that depends on whether the sun is reflecting off your whitewashed subject, or if most of your whitewashed subject is in shade.  It’s best to override your camera’s automatic white balance settings accordingly and manually set the camera for sunlight or shade balancing.

If you do all this then you can probably get away with photographing in JPEG and avoiding the pain of dealing with camera raw.  But if you want to make sure you get the best possible shot, this may be one of those occasions when you’ll want to go with raw to give yourself the most possible latitude in correcting things on a computer later.  After all, visiting Santorini isn’t something you’ll likely get to do very often.  You may only get there once, so don’t blow it.

And if you do get it all right, here’s just a small sample of what you can expect in the way of photographs: