Last year’s Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend (September 2024) marked the beginning of a new project that I assigned myself. I wanted to get better at maritime photography. So I decided to start taking a picture every day, until the next festival in 2025. My subjects will mostly be small boats, because that is what I love, and seascapes. I share a number of those pictures below.
The purpose of this once-a-day picture project is that it encourages me to always be looking; exercising my mind’s eye. This requires relaxing the normal filters that we process the world through, which is challenging, but the reward is an increased intimacy with the world. I will become more experienced with the full capabilities of my cameras, and also explore different techniques I have always been interested in, but have only dabbled with.
It helps that I now work full-time at the Northwest Maritime Center. I am always next to the water, or out on it, and have a front row seat to lots of boat building projects going on in the shop. Note this website expresses my personal viewpoints, and not those of the Northwest Maritime Center.
After a few months of this process, I have noticed an immediate change in how I am seeing and thinking about light and shapes, and the process of photography. It is breaking me out of boring habits, looking for new angles, subjects and techniques. Of course I have already failed at taking a shot every day. Cloudy, cold winter days have not been conducive to the project. But it was a never a hard goal anyway, just a fun project.
I do have a degree in landscape photography, and have made a living for many years as a snorkeling travel writer, which leans heavily on my photography, both on land and underwater. And I have always taken snapshots while boating. But I want to delve a bit deeper. In college I aspired to being a fine art landscape photographer. But the realities of the business side of that aspiration did not suit me at all. This was in the pre-digital era.
There are unique challenges to shooting maritime subjects and seascapes in the PNW. These cold waters, with their fast currents and big tide changes, are dangerous to both photographer and gear. And the rain. I have dropped and drowned my share of camera gear. Other challenges are that I am often taking pictures from either a moving platform, or of a moving subject, which can lead to images that are not sharp. And very often my photographic subject is further away than is ideal, requiring a long telephoto lens. Maritime subjects also often lack foreground content, that as a landscape photographer I would often use to help create a sense of depth, with leading lines, or other balancing features.
Moving forward I have some specific goals. I want to get better at very long exposures of the water, and to find more foggy scenes. I love fog. You can expect to see lots and lots of pictures and thoughts about maritime photography in the future. I have a mailing list if you want to receive notice of new posts.
So how is it going so far? Below are a few of the pictures I took during the last boat festival, and a few since.

I took a lot of pictures of this subject, trying to narrow down on what I wanted. What attracted me was the colors, of the blue background hull, reflected on the water and, of course, the stunning shape of the Whitehall transom. Plus I like little boats.

The Schooner Alycone. This was actually a week before the festival, when I was crewing on La Vie En Rose. This was a mid-day shot, which normally does not offer great light or colors. But the high contrast can be good in black and white. I am no pro at this, but look forward to playing with black and white more.

I have taken a ton of shots over the years of rows and rows of colorful and interesting boats at the festival. But this was an attempt to frame things differently, with some flowers in the foreground. It like it OK. Although I wish I had stopped it down a bit more so that flowers were also in focus. The boat festival is actually a difficult place to take pictures, because there is such chaos of boats and people, that it can be challenging to control what is in the frame.

This is a shot I feel I have taken several times over the years. But I like it. It is emotive for me, because when the Schooner Adventuress is at the dock it means it is boat festival time.

The picture at the top of the page is the famous sailboat Tally Ho raising a sail. I think it is the famous maritime photographer Neil Rabinowitz at the stern, working on an article about Tally Ho. I much prefer the image of Tally Ho at anchor. But I happen to love foggy images.

I worked at this shot, changing the focal point, changing the angle. I think this works fairly well, giving a festival feeling.

The dog is cute. But I also love all the colors in this shot.



All three of the pictures above are of the same Sid Skiff, which was built in the shop at work, using the wood from Schooner Martha’s old masts. The lettering and gold leaf was done by local Nick Mann.

I like this both because it is a riot of color, but it is also full of they types of characters that feel like the living soul of Port Townsend.

This was taken on my way to work, from the bluff above Fort Worden. My brain kept saying, rule of thirds, move the sun over. But I liked the feel of this.

Fog can make for rich saturated colors. The triangle of light at the bottom, mirrored by the triangle of foggy clouds above, are what make this picture. It draws your eye right up through the middle, giving a feel of depth.
P.S. If you are wondering how much small boat exploring and building on my own boats I have been doing, the answer is not much, in part do to this new job. But I am not complaining. I get a lot of that at work now. I did build a new tiller handle for my sail/oar boat Joy. And I started the cabin build on my Lavro Dory. And I also started building a new lightweight rowboat that I can use down at work, and it will also fit on top of the Lavro Dory. I will post more about those projects in the near future.
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