About the Image(s)

Here is an image I took quite a while ago, November of 2014. We decided to go visit the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA to take some pictures of her. We spent the whole day there, had dinner in one of her restaurants and the took some nighttime pictures of her all lit up. She was definitely showing her age at this point, with peeling paint on the superstructure, visible rust and crumbling decks. Her rigging lights were blown out at a number of points. She was closed during the pandemic and the company that ran her filed for bankruptcy. The city of Long Beach took over and has committed 12 million dollars for repairs and maintenance. She is scheduled to reopen in June 2023.

This is actually a composite of 3 images, one of her taken in the day and the other at night, as well as a sky replacement. The day and night images were taken with a Panasonic GH2 with the stock 14-45 lens. The night image was taken with the focal length set to 22 mm, aperture of f/4.5 and the shutter speed was 1/8. The ISO was set to 2500. The daytime image was taken with a focal length of 19 mm aperture of f/5.6, a shutter speed of 1/640 and an ISO of 160. Post processing was done in Photoshop 2023. The sky was taken with a Nikon D7200 with the stock lens on 9/27/2015 right after a lunar eclipse. The focal length set to 35 mm, aperture f/4.2 and the shutter speed was .77sec. The ISO was set to 4000. I made some initial adjustments with a Camera Raw filter and then applied a sharpening to selected parts of the hull and superstructure as well as the entrance. I then blended the daytime image masking out most of it except for the hull and superstructure with an opacity of 38 percent. Some transformation was used to match the perspective of the nighttime shot. I cloned in rigging lights where they were blown out and lit all the port holes with separate layers. I added a brightness masked brightness layer to adjust the brightness of the porthole lighting. I then added in the sky and blended it at 49 percent opacity with the existing sky.