Boat photography: how to explore harbours with your camera

So it's summer, and many of us are heading for the coast, hoping for some sun, sand and surf. There's also the photography, and boat photography is one subject that often gets overlooked, particularly in the large number of heavily visited traditional harbours.  

These can be lively places, with plenty of varied subject matter, angles, views and details that can be worthy of the camera's attention. For those who love boats and boating, such photography is pure joy. But harbours are places filled with possibilities, from wide views of the harbour itself to seaweed details, even for those who are not so enthusiastic.

All those jostling boats don't have to be photographed as boats, but as potentially graphic juxtapositions of triangles, squares, and other shapes, along with diagonally intersecting lines. We're looking at one great big graphic pattern and colour photo challenge, repeated regularly throughout our coast.

So whenever you find yourself near a harbour – whether large and workaday or tiny and quaint – get the camera out and get the creative photo juices going. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Setting the harbour scene

I'll readily confess that I'm a great lover of harbours, boats, and all that goes on in and around them. But I'll also be the first to agree that not every harbour easily lends itself to great photography. The larger commercial ports, in particular, are fairly dire places where inspiration can be hard to find.

So my love for this kind of photography revolves around the mostly small traditional fishing harbours, places of rough stone walls, colourful boats, piles of fishing tackle and lobster pots, surrounded if at all possible by crowds of ramshackle cottages. They're the places that are crammed with photographic possibilities.

You'll likely want to start with some general harbour views and images that set the scene with an overview of the location and its layout. That doesn't necessarily mean wide-angle lenses or views that take in the entire harbour, but those that give an overall sense of it.  

You may still use a telephoto lens to shoot just a slice, a cameo of the harbour. Still, it'll be a slice that encompasses many of the harbour's features, from moored boats to the harbour wall, to cottages and other buildings crowding around and perhaps a hillside that encloses the scene.

Such a description inevitably suggests the risk of ending up with images that are just chaotic and cluttered, containing lots of different elements but nothing strong enough to be the image's main subject for the viewer's eye to latch onto. That is a danger, but that's where the photographer's skill comes in: finding that overall view that simultaneously contains an element that works as the image's photographic subject, hooking the viewer's attention. 

Such an element might be a single, particularly dominant boat, for example, or perhaps a crane, a harbourside building, or even just the harbour's water constrained between walls but leading the eye into the scene. These subject elements mustn't fill the frame but must dominate it enough to grab attention.

The best times of day for such photography are usually very early in the morning or the late evening sunlight. These are times at which not only is the sun nice and golden but also at which you have the greatest chance of there being no wind and hence smooth, calm water. 

Photography under cloudy skies is possible, particularly if you can minimise the amount of sky visible in the images. Still, quite often, a combination of grey sky, grey water and grey stone walls results in rather dull and depressing images. However, this is not always the case, particularly if breaks in the clouds allow for shafts of sunlight, which can introduce a sense of drama.

Related: Summer photography: what to shoot during the holiday season 

Moving in: scenes within the scene

Most photography will consist of more detailed shots within the overall harbour scene, ranging from views along the harbour walls to clusters or lines of moored boats to human activity such as boat repair work or fish off-loading.

Admittedly, photography of a harbour wall does not sound especially enthralling, but you might be surprised. Many such walls and breakwaters come with some interesting curved or zigzag outlines that have been effectively made the subject centrepiece of many a dramatic image. 

Particularly effective here is to put the camera on a tripod and use a long exposure (at least several seconds). The wall is, of course, rock-solid, whereas the sea and clouds are constantly moving, which can result in atmospheric images. To get this effect, either shoot at dawn or dusk or use a neutral density filter on your lens.

This technique can be particularly effective on a cloudy, windy day when exposure of just a couple of seconds can result in a truly agitated image that captures or even exaggerates the roughness of the weather. A longer exposure of 30 seconds or more will completely blur out the moving waters and clouds, resulting in a rather calming, ethereal, other-worldly scene.

Inevitably, at some point, you're going to home in on boats, either alone or in groups. A random cluster of boats may not make a great photographic composition, so try to find arrangements that somehow come together into a workable composition. This might include, for example, a set of boats moored side-by-side, forming a line leading the eye into the scene and off towards the background.

Unless the first boat is very close, such a shot may need a telephoto lens, firstly to compress the grouping and the distance to enhance the sense of a crowd, and secondly to minimise the amount of featureless water between yourself and the first boat. A certain amount of water is fine – indeed desirable – but too much (as you could get if you used a wide-angle lens) results in too much space between you and the subject.

That said, wide-angle lenses can hugely effectively exaggerate diagonals, hence adding some sense of drama. One of my favourites here is to come down very low and close to a quayside mooring bollard attached to a bunch of mooring lines. I'll use a wide-angle lens to shoot along those lines towards the moored boats, something that—provided I've got myself down low enough—enables those lines to create some strong diagonals. Because I'm using a wide-angle lens, the boats will appear to be further away than they are, so there will be some water in the foreground, but hopefully not too much. There is, however, likely to be quite a lot of sky, so make sure it's an interesting one!

Another point to remember when shooting with the harbour's water in view is that the amount of light bouncing back off the water and towards the camera is much less than that coming off other subjects or directly from the sky. To the eye, it may all look fine, but the camera's sensor is sensitive to this difference, and in the final images, the water will often look significantly darker than the rest of the scene.

The resulting imbalance can mar the image somewhat, but you can correct it by using a neutral density graduated filter (or ND-grad) on your lens. Putting the filter's light/dark transition line along the water's edge (say, where the water meets the harbour wall) will help to lighten the water and darken the rest of the scene, balancing everything up and resulting in an image that looks much closer to what your eyes see.

All this, of course, assumes that there is water in the harbour. Many smaller fishing harbours are empty at low tide, a time when they generally don't look especially photogenic. So be aware of local tide times, and try to tie your photography in with those occasions when high tide coincides with early morning or late evening sunlight.

Related: A guide to coastal and seashore photography

Capturing details and getting abstract

The final and most 'intimate' phase of any harbour photography is to home in on close details, both around the harbour and on the boats. 

Quayside piles of gear ranging from fishing nets to floats, to chains, to lobster pots may look like a chaotic, rotting, rusting mess to the untrained eye. But to the keen-eyed photographer, it should represent a treasure trove of potential detailed images. A dumped nylon net can generate some remarkable close-ups. With various colours and a collection of knots, triangular or square meshes, and the occasional lurid float, a photographer could be in heaven for quite some time.

With the boats themselves, there can be an array of possibilities. Admittedly, modern, sleek white glass fibre boats are generally less appealing for this kind of detail photography than older traditional craft with their multiple colours and tangles of ropes. Still, much can be done with either.

At its simplest, there is just the bow of a boat (i.e. the front end). If you're able to look straight down onto a boat, you can get a nice triangle created by the bow and the area immediately behind it, set against the plain backdrop of the water. If you're lower down and looking side-on to the boat, then you might be able to get something a little curvier as the hull sweeps back from the bow.

Beyond that, close details can include a coil of rope on the deck, a line passing through a pulley, or a close-up of a compass or wheel. Even knots can make for some fascinating detail shots and, if incorporated with a mooring line, can be a remarkably simple image, especially if the backdrop is just plain out-of-focus water. Mooring lines can result in excellent abstract images, especially as a set of crisscrossing lines against plain water as the backdrop.

The most abstract of all, dare I say it, is oil on water. Yes, engine oil still gets spilt into our harbours. Although it is not a good thing, an oily sheen can be used under the right lighting angles to generate some wonderful, kaleidoscopic oil-on-water abstract images. Keep an eye out for oil lit by the sun, and zoom in with a telephoto lens to capture the best of the patterns.

Last but not least, there are reflections. Boats sitting in calm water, especially colourful boats, can create fantastic reflections that deserve to be photographed. The water must be very calm: the slightest breeze of wind cutting across the water will ruin any reflection very quickly. Once again, early morning or evening are the best times, especially the former, when the wind is likely to be at its weakest.

You can, of course, photograph both boat and reflection together in the same image, which often works extremely well. As mentioned already, however, you may find that using an ND-grad filter here helps to balance the exposure for the boat with that of the reflection, generating a very evenly balanced image.

You can also zoom in on the reflection, or even a part of it, creating something quite abstract and not wholly predictable. To do this, you'll probably need a fairly strong telephoto lens – at least 300mm – to reach right into the reflection and be sure of cutting out any part of the actual boat.

To become abstract, you can zoom in on wobbly reflections of something as simple as a group of masts or rigging, perhaps juxtaposed against something sitting on the water, such as a mooring buoy.

Not surprisingly, photography of reflections needs a certain specific set of conditions to be successful, which include:

• high tide, or at least lots of water in the harbour
• good quality light, preferably early morning or evening sunlight
• flat calm water
• use of a reasonably strong telephoto lens

If you have all these together, then you're in reflection business.

Related: Coming in close: getting to grips with macro photography

Having fun with harbour photography

Even for someone not wildly enthusiastic about boats, harbour photography can be a lot of fun. A plethora of shapes, colours, angles, lighting and reflections can be used and played with to create some wonderful compositions, many of which might not seem to have a great deal to do with a harbour or boats. If you're at the seaside this summer, give it a try. You might be surprised by what you find.

This blog was written by Nigel Hicks, a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To learn more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

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