This week’s theme is not subject but location: Curaí§ao, an island country in the Caribbean.
Working with this photo also reminds me of the importance of taking photos with some flexibility for cropping. Not always possible, of course, but worth thinking about as I look through the viewfinder. My brain screens out the things I’m not interested in but the camera captures it all.
I’d like to have this shot, for example, from different angles and degrees of zoom, to see what might have emerged if I’d had more options for cropping out some distracting elements on the dock without having to also crop these wonderful, weathered boats.
As it is, this is what I have.
Those look for all the world like the one upon which we rode to go out snorkelling once in Cuba. Note the word “once.”
Tom
Tom – I guess it’s possible to put too much effort into shipshape-ness, but too little certainly seems like the more acute danger. I find these picturesque, but wouldn’t want to get further from land in any of them than my swimming distance.
It occurs to me (perhaps for the first time) that boats are like religions. They all have a certain commonality; they tend to be pointed at the front, for example, and be broader in the middle, and form a hole in the water that keeps them afloat. But the boats in St. Lucia mostly have a protruding keel sticking out the bow. Boats in Thailand have those long steerable propeller shafts sticking out the back. The Pacific Islands have multihull boats. The dugouts of the Congo look, umm, dug out; the dugout canoes of Haida Gwaii are things of beauty…. Same purpose, same function, but significantly different.
Jim T
Jim – Hmm. Would a weather-beaten boat signify a dogma past its best-before date, I wonder, or a faith pared down to the essentials? Interesting metaphor.
Funny how the peeling paint in this composition is painterly. The boats display a remarkable reflection of the colours in their surroundings. I wonder about the construction of what appears to be a paddle. I wonder about many things, which is why you have another super picture.
Laurna – The near boat does look a bit like a dropcloth, doesn’t it? I hadn’t noticed what appears to be bracing (?) on that paddle, and leaving the paddle in the boat raises other questions. On recreational lakes in Canada, if you pull up your watercraft (canoe, kayak) on the shore, you remove your paddle(s) to reduce the likelihood of your craft being taken for a spin (sploosh?). Interesting that the owners of these working boats in a pretty poor place don’t seem to have the same concern.