Travelin' Shutterbug: FLORIDAFLORIDA KEYSKEY WEST’S MALLORY SQUARE

If you don’t like sunset pictures, sailboats or silhouettes, then this post probably isn’t for you. But if you do, read on.

Mallory Square on the northwest end of Key West had been a planned terminus on our first visit to the island on Jan. 17, 2017, but we got a late start on hitting the road that day, and time quickly got away from us. But we made it two days later, and I’m tickled that we did.

Mallory Square is an open plaza with a history of being where folks congregated to watch other people, boats and — perhaps most significantly — sunsets. It’s an area packed with stores, shops, eateries and mobile vendors and artists who sell their goods, wares and crafts at least until the sun goes down.

I don’t know if huge ocean cruise liners dock at Mallory Square every day, but there was one there all day on Jan. 19. We had come back to Key West two days after the first visit and first saw the big vessel while peering from the top of Key West Lighthouse.

It was still at Mallory Square when we arrived there later, an hour or so before sunset. It finally lumbered out to sea about 10 minutes before the key sunset drama, after most people had lined up by the plaza ocean wall to watch the skies and while what seemed like scores of other vessels lingered on the water to witness the sunset.

I heard people say there had been some kind of sailing competition that afternoon, and that would explain the huge amount of ocean traffic.

I shot a lot of photos, partly because the volume of vessels presented lots of opportunity for excellent compositions, but also because I was hunting for the ideal camera settings so the images I’d take pointing straight into the western skies would’t blow out detail on my images. I swapped out my polarizing filter in favor of a UV (ultraviolet) filter early on because the extra darkness of the polarizer was forcing me to use too slow of a shutter speed and too high of an ISO. I decided to sacrifice cloud detail to ensure stop action and noiseless images.

I got some silhouettes with the sun in them that I was very happy with (foremost, the one leading off the post. I was thrilled to get the two people standing on the right of the vessel left of the sun) juxtaposed with the middle craft’s sail partially concealing the right side of the sun. Several other compositions worked very well, too, I felt, at sunset’s “decisive moment” (a phrased popularized by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson). I’ve included those photos below.

I turned away from the sun and got a few shots I liked of vessels and even a parasailer.

And as usual, if you’d like to see a larger, sharper version of an image, click on the image. This is particularly important if you access the blog using a mobile device. To view a full gallery of images from the visit to Mallory Square, follow the link in this sentence.

Above: The passenger cruise liner dockside shortly before finally heading out to sea.

Above and below: I got two shots of parasailers while at Mallory Square, and these are those two. Neither was very close to the dock where I was situated. I preferred the frame above because it gives an idea how close to the shore the parasailer and its boat were located. While the frame contains two parasailers, you see the boat connection for only the parasailer in the lower position. The boat leading the more elevated parasailer is out of the picture on the left.

Above and next three below: Some sailboats heading out to sea from a direction that wasn't looking directly into the sun, hence the comparative normal color and exposures.

Above: Being able to catch gulls on either side of a ship’s sail, I thought, was a decent accomplishment. Getting a third, low-flying gull into the frame (bottom left, over the water) was gravy.

Above: I cropped this shot two ways and put both into my gallery. This is the near-original perspective shot, which I felt better exploited the sun's reflection coming toward the camera. I also applied a tighter crop that made the vessel larger.

Above: I really liked the progression of vessel size and sail volume, left to right, depicted here.

Above: Integrating a docked vessel and boater into a perspective shot involving the three-sail vessel as the latter approaches the sun.

Above: Another sun-touches-the water shot involving just the two sailboats from the lead-off photo.

Above: Another depth-of-field silhouette composition, incorporating a man working on the sails on a boat dockside, near me, with the cruise liner at it heads to sea, blocking the sun from my sight line. I took some shots with the nose of the ship seemingly piercing the individual, too.

Above: Before the cruise liner took off, I composed this shot of its nose in a sort of half-framing of the yacht seen in the lead-off photo. The colors in this photo didn't turn out well, rendering it a monochrome-only picture.

Above: With this day being the opening day of a weekend sailing competition, the sea near Mallory Square was a glut of boats in the period before sundown, as evidence in this shot.

Above and next two below: Shots taken in those spectacular, color-rich-sky moments just after the sun drops below the horizon.

Above and mostly what follows below are shots taken in Mallory Square before sunset. The shot above is the commercial block along Duval Street immediately adjacent to the square. Just to the forefront and right of the above scene is where I the street performer and his puppy shown in the first photo below. I originally did not crop this photo; I composed it to include the street and storefronts to the left. I don’t know why I didn’t at least apply a crop as shown below for a second version at the point of post-processing, but I did so as I pulled the image while putting together this post.