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Sapphire Princess

The largest luxury cruise ship to visit New Zealand, the Sapphire Princess is back in Auckland again. Since her inaugural visit to New Zealand on the 17th Dec 2004 she has returned several more times.

At an impressive 290 metres in length, 41.5 M in breadth and standing 54m above the water the Sapphire Princess boasts an impressive 1,339 passenger cabins and caters for about 3, 078 passengers.

Sapphire Princess
See more images of the Sapphire Princess

However, the record is about to be broken early tomorrow morning. The Queen Mary 2 will be visiting Auckland on 17th February with much fanfare and celebration.

I fireworks display has also been organised for her departure in the evening at around 10:00pm.

This will be the culmination of the busiest week on record for Auckland with a total of 9 Cruise ships visiting port between 11 - 17th February.

So, I was up with the birds this morning to capture her last day as the record holder before the 2 year record is broken tomorrow.

About this Image

The above image was taken just after the break of dawn as the light started to filter through the clouds. I was lucky that the weather held out as it was trying to rain at one point (typical Auckland weather - four seasons in one day).

Image was exported from Rawshooter Premium as an 8 Bit Tiff then some minor curve adjustments and sharpening applied with the Gimp. Downsize to web dimensions and sharpen a second time (I know a lot of people are going to say sharpen only once as the last step of processing. But, the reality is when preparing images for the web in most cases I get a much cleaner image if I apply some further sharpeining after scaling).

  • Camera: Olympus E300
  • Lens: 14-45 Kit Lens (would have been nice to have something a bit wider for close-ups)
  • Focal length: 23mm
  • ISO: 100
  • Aperture: f 4.5
  • Speed: 1/200 sec

Queen Mary 2
Submitted by photo-info on Sun, 18/02/2007 - 14:47.

For those who are interested I have posted some pictures of the Queen Mary 2. They can be seen here.