The Flying Dutchman… a sort of

I made this shot standing at the edge of a small harbour after midnight, the kind of hour where everything becomes abstract unless it’s lit. The boat, isolated and slightly listing, sat in complete stillness, half-moored, half-abandoned. It wasn’t moving, but it didn’t feel settled either. That in-betweenness is what caught my attention.

The frame leaned heavily on underexposure—on purpose. I wanted the boat to emerge from the blackness like a memory, not an object. I metered for the faintest highlights and let the rest fall into noise and void. What the image lacks in tonal range, it gains in atmosphere. The blacks are thick, the shadows granular, and the sea is more suggestion than surface.

Technically, I pushed the limits of what the sensor could hold. ISO was maxed out, and you can see it—grain crawling across the image like static. But that noise is part of the character. A clean version of this scene wouldn’t have felt haunted. I shot with a 50mm, wide open, handheld. No stabilisation. No tripod. Just braced breath and instinct.

Compositionally, it’s a frontal confrontation. The boat points directly at the viewer, like it’s returning from somewhere it shouldn’t have gone. The darkness strips away detail until only the essentials remain—antennae, railings, empty windows.

This isn’t a documentary photo. It’s a fiction made real by light—or lack of it. A ghost ship without a myth, held together by quiet tension and bad weather.