Gloucester Parade of Sail

Each year on Labor Day weekend, the city of Gloucester, MA holds an event in their harbor called the Parade of Sail.  The city brings in a large number of old sailing vessels that are available for viewing throughout the weekend.  Then on Sunday, each vessel sails out of the main harbor, past the Fisherman monument at the edge of the harbor and out to sea.  It's quite an event and very impressive to see these ships sail past.

It provides a wonderful opportunity for photography.  I was positioned in Stage Fort Park at a rocky overlook that got a full view of the harbor.  We new from past experience that all the ships would sail right past that location.  Now, the ships started out at about 10:00am so this was not an opportunity for taking beautiful sailing ships in 'Golden Light'.  It was, 'unfortunately', bright and clear with a fair amount of clouds.  You get some nice shots of the ships, but to get something unique you need to be a little creative.  If you look at the first picture, I have taken a nice shot of a large number of the sailboats and converted it to black and white.  Then I took a little liberty with the look of the picture by adding contrast and making the clouds look more ominous than they actually were.  I was trying to change the mood of the picture through some small manipulations of the areas of the picture.

This image shows a slightly different processing technique.  Again, I have brought up the contrast in the clouds to again bring some drama to the sky.  And I was able to brighten the sails to get a bit of glow into the sails and draw the viewers attention to the boat.

I'll leave you today with this final picture.  This sailboat had come through the harbor and was turning to leave the harbor and head out to sea  I thought it was kind of a nice way to  end the day.  You can find other pictures I took that day here at my website.