Jeremiah O’Brien in Dry Dock

The Jeremiah O’Brien was in dry dock for about a month.  I was lucky enough to be on the very short list of people allowed into the BAE shipyard at San Francisco’s pier 70 to shoot her and I was the only one to do it at night.  BAE is a tough location to access, they’re very restrictive about photography in the yard.

I managed 3 trips to the yard that month to shoot the restoration progress.  These images are from the first trip, when the ship had just been hit with a coat of primer.

Dry Dock Jerry ::::: February 2012

Shot at the end of dusk, from the top of the dry dock wall.  This is a Photoshop composite: the sky is a 5 second exposure, the ship and dry dock wall, a 1.6 second exposure with a few blown highlights on the bow muted by a .6 second exposure.  Sorta like HDR, only more subdued.

The Machine's Domain ::::: February 2012

This was shot much later that night as I was entering the dry dock itself to shoot the hull.  BAE probably didn’t want me down there, but hey, no one said I couldn’t go in here . . .  30 second exposure with a lot of highlights burned down in Photoshop.  Buncha lens flare was cloned out too.

Late Night Welding ::::: February 2012

Photographs just don’t do justice to the scale of this thing.  When you’re aboard her it seems like a small, or at most, a medium-sized ship.  But down here, looking up at her, she’s humongous.  Even at 10 o’clock at night, there were still 6 workmen crawling all over the inside and outside of the ship’s drive shaft.  To balance the volume of light here I had to combine a 4 second base exposure for the brightly lit areas with 8 second and 20 second exposures for the shadows.  I shot at f/16 to enhance the diffraction spikes in that big spotlight.  No added light for this, the place was lit up like a stadium!

Lots more dry dock images to come.