2013 Christmas Boat Parade in Newport Beach

Christmas Boat Parade is one of largest and most famous holiday events in Orange County, CA, where richly decorated yachts, and smaller boats light up the harbor. The annual event has been running for more than a century. For 2013, the 105th parade is happening this weekend (Dec. 18-22), and we decided to attend by taking a short cruise on Friday evening.

As expected, we had our cameras and took a few shots. The lighting was pretty challenging though. We were on a boat and thus using a tripod was really out of the question. At the same time, there was not much light such that even at the largest aperture (f/2.8), we had to bump up the ISO to 6400 to get decent shutter speeds for handheld shots. Note that the boats and the houses were rather far requiring us to use our 70-200mm f/2.8 telephoto lens. This meant that the shutter speeds had to be even higher. Remember that the longer the focal length, the higher the shutter speed has to be to avoid motion blur. A general rule of thumb that sometimes is mentioned is to use 1/focal_length as the minimum shutter speed (e.g., at 100mm, try not to go lower than 1/100 sec). Of courses, with many of today’s lenses that support some form of Vibration Reduction (or Image Stabilization), one may afford using lower shutter speeds. But when the camera itself in moving (e.g., in our case here while riding on a boat), higher shutter speeds have to be used.

A side benefit of being farther away from the subject in low light is that larger apertures can be used while still having a reasonable depth of field (DoF). Remember that DoF depends on three key parameters: aperture, focal length, and distance from the subject. At a given aperture, the larger the focal length, the smaller DoF will be. However, the larger the distance from the subject, the larger DoF will be. For example, at f/2.8 aperture, and at 200mm focal length, if you are 20m from your subject, your DoF will be 1.67m, whereas if you were only 5m away from your subject, your DoF would be reduced to only 10.08cm!

Another issue is to deal with the added noise when ISO is bumped up to 6400. Remember that increasing ISO increases the light sensitivity of the sensor by further amplifying the signal. But when the signal is amplified, so is noise, resulting in more noticeable noise across the image. So while our camera (Nikon D800E) has pretty impressive noise and low-light performance, given its very high resolution, it can still very much benefit from down-sampling and noise-reduction in post processing. For pictures here, we used Nik Software‘s Dfine tool which seems to do a pretty good job of noise reduction.

Here are some of our pictures. If you are in Orange County this weekend, and if you have some free time, make sure to stop by in Balboa and enjoy the parade. Remember to arrive early as finding parking spots can be a real challenge.

Thanks for visiting, and as always, please feel free to leave any comments and critiques you may have…