Vivid Sydney, from the deck of a cruise boat...

Vivid 2019
How do you record a boat trip experience on the night Vivid 2019 opened and still get interesting colourful images? As it happened it was very hard because pottering about in the harbour on a large boat was a bit like riding in a washing machine. On several occasions all the guests had to hang on for dear life as we bobbed and corkscrewed about in the washing machine. High ISO was the only way out of this mess. Unfortunately very high ISO. I was pretty happy with this HDR image, shot at ISO12,500. A bit soft, a bit grainy but somewhat better than the lousy results produced by my smartphone.

Zooming with the lens while moving on a boat is not the best recipe for success. What I did here was to take one zoomed shot that looked really dynamic in one half and was mostly black in the other then duplicated the layer, flipped it to give this mirrored effect - and finished it off by changing the Blend Mode from Normal to Difference (which highlights any tones that are not 100% on top of each other - because they were effectively reversed by the flipping action, it fills the entire frame with more colour. (Pic by natalie Hitchens).

A similar zoomed shot, flipped and with the Difference Blend Mode set on the top layer.
(Image by Natalie Hitchens)

Another zoomed shot, flipped and with the Difference Blend Mode set on the top layer.
(Image by Natalie Hitchens)

Taken before boarding the vessel with some light still illuminating the Sydney sky. 1/15s @ f2.8, ISO 3200
(Three bracketed frames processed using Aurora HDR Pro)

Another almost impossible shot to get because it was so dark and the luxurious motor cruiser was quickly throbbing into the gloom behind the Harbour Bridge.
1/50s @ f2.8, ISO 8000

Zoomed abstract detail of a tower block in Darling harbour

Panned shot of a small harbour boat passing our much larger harbour boat. Kinda tricky to get a good panning shot when both subject and the camera are moving at different speeds.

Another nice, zoomed shot.
Because zooming at night can basically fill the frame with a lot of black, as well as colour movement, I select and copy some of the better-looking 'zoomy' bits and paste them back into the file to cover over the really dark areas, making sure that they line up with the original sections by adding a bit of transform.perspective distortion to give a near perfect zoomed effect.