While the MV Explorer was docked in Amsterdam I went on a field trip with my parents to the Tulip festival at Keukenhof Gardens. We were lucky since this was the last day of the festival. For a photographer that likes taking pictures of flowers this was a target rich environment. Lots of bright and vibrant colors.
After arriving at the Narita Airport and passing through customs I took the Airport Limo Bus to Shinjuku in Tokyo. It was a bright sunny day with clear blue skies. This is a street view from the bus. Lots of bright and vibrant colors. I arrived a couple of days early to equilibrate to the time difference.
Street in Shinjuku viewed from the Airport Limo Bus Image taken with a Leica CL camera and 18 mm f/2.8 lens (ISO 250, f/2.8, 1/500 sec).
We passed through the Panama Canal on the MV Explorer. I was part of a group led by Michael Mariant that set up ten cameras in eight locations on the ship to take sequences of images throughout the day that would be used to create a time-lapse video Panama Canal: A Transit in Timelapse of the transit. I operated two of the cameras. A Nikon D3x with a 14-24 mm lens positioned on the port aft side and a Nikon D3s with a 16 mm fisheye lens positioned aft pointed straight back. In addition to the above link to the edited composite time-lapse video, I am including time-lapse videos from the images taken by my cameras. At each lock a pair of locomotives on each side would help pull the ship through the locks.
While on a previous Semester at Sea voyage with a group of photographers we had a contest to capture an image of a ship silhouette passing in front of the setting (or rising) sun. This image taken from the deck of the MV Explorer traveling from Italy to Spain wouldn’t count since the sun wasn’t low enough yet.
While we were traveling between Mexico and Guatemala on the MV Explorer, my father was playing a game of Scrabble on his notepad. I don’t know who he was playing. The score was 42 to 30, and the words played were BIG, BOX, REX, RAVE, LENT, and TENT.
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