Helen Stephenson's Sea Cloud II Pictures

Sea Cloud II visited London twice during 2004. I photographed her on the first of those two occasions, as her second visit coincided with the time I was away on holiday. Sea Cloud II anchored to the east of Tower Bridge, and I discovered her by chance. Luckily I had my handbag camera, a Minolta Vectis 20 APS compact loaded with film, and I shot a few pictures from near Tower Bridge.

Having discovered Sea Cloud II, I checked the Port of London Authority's website for shipping movements and found out when she was going to leave port, and I hauled my SLR cameras up to Town that day. Unfortunately, the Ricoh XR/X loaded with slide film which I was using to take my "serious" pictures turned out to have worn-out batteries in it, and instead of ceasing to work like the Pentax MZ/M does, it went on taking pictures but overexposed them all, so I got a lot of "high key" pictures of Sea Cloud II, most of which I never scanned into my computer.

Here is one which I did scan, which shows Sea Cloud II against the backdrop of Tower Bridge, Tower 42 (the one-time Nat West Tower) and the Swiss Re Building, which is affectionately known as The Gherkin.

I did have another camera with me which was loaded with ISO400 colour negative film, and I used it to snap a picture of Sea Cloud II as she "sailed" downriver at twilight under power from her diesel engines.