Bahama Cruise 01

For the Christmas holidays my family went on a cruise, and I decided to bring the Big Cahoona. I did debate about it, though - Would it be safe to haul the thing everywhere? What if I got tired of carrying all that weight around? Would there be a safe place too keep it if I wanted to leave it in our room? What about the stops and excursions...would the salt air or sand place our considerable investment in jeopardy? For all of those nagging doubts, I decided to go ahead and take the plunge. After all, I need to learn to use it sometime, right?

Turns out I made the right decision. Not only that, I was pleased to learn - as my family, and now my friends, have heard ad nauseum - that every single camera issued to the dozen or so professionals on board was the D300. In fact, I got to say that mine was better because it has the little "s" suffixed on the name and theirs didn't!

So that gave me the injection of reassurance needed to go ahead and explore the potential of the Big Cahoona. Well over a thousand shots were captured, and of those we kept a little over 400. Narrowing that down further to the very best shots to include in this blog (which excluded the people and family photos), we now have 28 that I can say are worthy of posting.

Today's posting was taken on the very first night...which, as it turned out, was the only evening on the trip that proved suitable for a decent sunset shot. It was darkened quite a bit to bring out the rays and color, and sadly has more noise than normal because I accidentally left the ISO on 800 instead of 200. That may not have been so bad, though, because the higher setting increased the shutter speed, which was helpful on a swaying ship with gusty winds on deck.

In fact, shutter speed became an issue during the entire trip because, I learned, the lens purchased with the Big Cahoona is a bit slow. Thus, every shot taken was weighted with a decision on how to keep the images sharply focused by manipulating ISO, flash and/or exposure compensation. I tried to remember to use 800 ISO for all interior shots and 200 for exteriors.