I am interested to know more about the evolution of shipboard photography and how it has developed over the years (no pun intended). To start things off, here is an account of how things were during my time on board the QE2, working as a photographer between August 1978 and April 1982.
Almost unbelievably I don't have any photos of the darkroom in my collection. I am in the process of trying to find out who took ownership of all the negatives when the company we worked for was sold as I am sure there must be some pictures somewhere, so if anyone can shed any light on the new owners I would be most grateful. Perhaps if anyone is travelling on any of the new Queens soon could you please find out the name of the photography concession holders and let me know.
The photography team consisted of four people for transatlantics and short cruises, but for the world cruise that went up to five. The 1982 world cruise saw the introduction of video as a commercial enterprise, so one of the team of five concentrated full-time on the development of this new side of the business which effectively put us back to a team of four photographers; despite this, we went on to set a new record in takings (but that’s another story). In the forums’ gallery I have noticed a picture of the 1983 photography team and it comprised six people, so I am not sure if the video crew had increased to two or the photographers had reverted to five.
The main team generally worked for six or seven months at a time, though there were no employment contracts. If you weren’t up to the job, there would be someone on the Southampton dockside to take your place, and it did happen a few times whilst I was on board. Leave was usually covered by a couple of reserves, who were happy to work aboard for short periods as a break from their usual shoreside businesses. The company we worked for was called Ocean Pictures (Cruising) Ltd and as they had the photography concessions on QE2 and four other ships, there were plenty of opportunities to transfer between ships.
We each had our own single cabin on five deck and had full deck privileges with only a few exceptions, namely the Casino bar and some First Class bars, although it was only the Casino that was really off limits to all except the Chief Photographer. As a result, we were able to mix freely with the passengers when we were not working. We had our own table in the passenger section of the ’Tables of The World’ restaurant and were very well looked after (we were quite good tippers though). In addition to this we had access to all crew areas too. There was occasional resentment from some crew members in some bars but we were made welcome in most of them.
My first cabin 5014
The darkroom was situated on six deck at the bottom of ‘F’ Stairway: It consisted of two compartments, the dry side and wet side. The dry side was where we did the photo printing, kept all the cameras, flashes, film, spare parts for the printing and processing equipment and a variety of other consumables. The wet side was where all the photographic chemical processing took place. In the dry side we had two Durst HS75 colour printers, one loaded with 5” paper for our 7”x5”photos of passengers, the other loaded with 4” paper for printing 6”x4” for our on-board film processing service which was available to passengers and crew.
The printer we used for the develop & print service was replaced in the 1981 refit with a smaller Pro-Pak printer which took up less floor space and was mounted through the wall between the dry and wet sides for easier loading on to the processor. The photographic paper was kept in one of the fruit & vegetable stores as it needed to be kept cool; we did have to remember to get enough out of the store in advance though, so that it could warm up before we needed to use it. Film was kept in a fridge in the darkroom along with a few beers (in case of emergency). All fluorescent lighting was from daylight corrected tubes so there was no difference in colour when the photographs went on sale in our shop, which, when we moved to Upper deck, was mainly illuminated by daylight.
For our passenger photographs we used Agfacolor 80 s negative film. When I first started, this was supplied in 50m lengths from which we loaded our own 36 exposure rolls using a ‘daylight loader’. A downside to this was that it meant the loss of the last frame on each roll of film, so some passengers were left disappointed when they were unable to find the pictures they knew had been taken, but by about 1980 we were using ready-loaded film which overcame this problem. The empty plastic canisters went to the hospital to be used as pill bottles for seasickness tablets.
Another difficulty was that Agfacolor film had different process chemistry than Kodak. This meant that in order to offer a processing service to passengers and crew we needed two different sets of film processing tanks. I forget the numbers of the Agfa process, but the Kodak one was C41 which was quite common and most commercially available film was compatible with it.
After the films had been developed, dried and numbered, we exposed the negatives onto rolls of Agfacolor photographic paper using the Durst printer; at about the one hundred exposure mark we would turn all the lights off, cut out the part roll of exposed prints from the printer, re-thread the remaining paper, carry the exposed roll through to the wet room, attach a special clip to the paper and attach it to a continuous belt which led the paper through the various chemicals, through the dryer and onto a roller at the other end; then close the lightproof door at the back of the machine and turn the lights back on. The paper processor was a Wainco CPA, which had been made specifically to fit the QE2 darkroom.
The above sequence of loading was such a frequent event that I could literally do it with my eyes closed and so, even though the lights were off, I actually did find it easier to close my eyes whilst doing it! On one occasion, well into the 1982 world cruise and not long after having visited Japan, the photography team was all very tired; one night it came time to load the machine, so I closed my eyes and went through the usual routine only to find when I opened my eyes that I had forgotten to turn the lights out! To make matters worse, there were two other team members in the darkroom and neither of them said a word. Thankfully there was only a little bit of edge fogging on that batch and we managed to get away without too much loss.
Once the rolls of photographs were all printed and processed they had to be cut and then given a unique reference number which matched with the number of the negative. The numbering system we used consisted of a letter and number combination. The letters denoted the voyage and the number related to the negative number on that voyage. This was all done manually, so we would check the first and last image on each roll of film as we were numbering the prints to make sure everything matched together. On a typical transatlantic we would shoot around three thousand pictures on each leg. Considering we only effectively had a couple of days and nights to work in this meant we were kept quite busy.
We were not provided with any kind of uniform but we did have a dress code to follow which mirrored that of the officers. Daytime in cool waters we wore grey trousers, white shirt and blue tie with a dark blue blazer, but at sea we could drop the tie. We were also allowed to wear a ribbed woolen navy sweater instead of the blazer. In warmer waters, on cruises for example, when the officers switched in to whites, we wore white trousers, white shoes and red polo shirts, though we switched to blue polo shirts in about 1980. Evening wear followed the orders for the day and was either; formal, Black tie and tuxedo, or smart casual, jacket and tie, whatever the weather.
The cameras we used were Nikkormat’s made by Nikon. These were a simple, reliable and robust 35mm SLR. My sister (also a former QE2 photographer) still uses one which she bought from the ship when they were replaced by Nikon FM cameras in about 1980. We mainly used 50mm Nikkor lenses, but for some table shots in the restaurants we had to use a 35mm wide angle lens. We tried to keep the use of wide angle lenses to a minimum as they had a distorting effect towards the edges and could make people appear a little wider than they might have been. The flash guns were Metz 402 with a separate battery pack, housing a 6-volt lead acid (wet cell) battery. Although reliable, the battery pack made them a bit cumbersome to use as the packs were worn over the shoulder like a bag and tended to swing about. The good thing about these was that you could easily see what state of charge the batteries were in as they had little plastic balls that floated or sank according to the charge.
Don't know what we were doing but left to right, shows Robert Knowles, my sister Christine and myself using the Metz 402 flashes and Nikkormats
These flashes were replaced in about 1981 with Metz 45CT1 units which were of a single unit design. They had a Ni-Cad battery housed in the handle of the flash, so no more battery packs to lug around on our shoulders; the downside was that you could not tell how charged they were until they stopped working, so we had to always carry spares in our pockets. Ni-Cad battery technology was still relatively new then and people did not really understand much about memory effect in this type of battery. Because of this, charging problems and battery life did give us a few headaches at times.
Up until about October 1978 all the photographs we took were displayed in locked, glass fronted cabinets on Boat deck, forward of the double room gallery and shops. They had their identification number stuck on the front, passengers had to make a note of the number and then place an order at our little kiosk which was located on the port side of Boat deck, forward of ‘E’ staircase. Late that night we would go and remove the sold pictures and replace them with the ones we had taken that night. Next morning we would put the sold photos in a wallet and an envelope, then go and deliver them to the relevant cabin number given by the passenger. As you can imagine, the location of the photo display and shop was not very popular with the passengers in the suites, as the corridors were frequently blocked with people looking for their pictures and it could get rather noisy.
So the photo gallery was relocated to Upper deck, still on the port side, just aft of the Casino and between ‘E’ stairway and the lower level of the double room. Not only did the location change but the method of selling also changed. All photos were now on open display and passengers could pick them off the display racks, take them to the kiosk, pay for them and take them away there and then. Unfortunately, this meant that running the shop had now changed from being a one person operation to a two or three person operation as there were always some who ‘forgot to pay’ so we had to place observers at each end of the gallery at busy times whilst a third was in the shop kiosk dealing with sales. All on-board transactions were still cash or credit card then, so there was always small change to be dealt with. Pictures were priced at US$3.75 so we went through huge amounts of quarters. The upside was that this open selling method boosted sales by a good margin as people were more likely to impulse buy. The most we ever sold in a single day was on the ’82 world cruise alluded to earlier in this text, when we were around Japan. The Japanese people are unbelievably enthusiastic about photographs, especially those taken on board QE2. Following a Captains cocktail party attended by a large number of Japanese passengers, we sold over two thousand pictures in a single day!!
The photo gallery on Upper deck port side between Casino and double room
Our fairly standard range of photographs taken on a transatlantic crossing consisted of, Coming aboard, Meeting the Captain, At the Captain’s party, and at dinner. Sometimes we would wander around the bars and take casual photos on request and depending on things like weather and time of day, we would sometimes fit in shots on deck or lifeboat drill but, as already mentioned, we were time limited on the transatlantic runs.
As far as financial rewards were concerned we did really quite well. All our accommodation, food and tips to our stewards were covered as part of the package, so apart from buying our clothes and paying our laundry and bar bills we had no on board expenses to find. We were allowed to draw an advance against our wages of up to $200 per week from the ‘Bureau’ later known as the Pursers office. Wages were all commission based and were on a sliding scale as a percentage of our gross takings, the higher the takings the larger the percentage, this could be up to a maximum of 10% for the chief photographer and 7% each for the rest of the team. Transatlantics and short cruises I think we were generally in the range of 9% and 6% respectively. The QE2 of course was almost entirely run in US$ but the company we worked for was British and our bank accounts were in £ Sterling so conversions had to be made to calculate our pay. This worked very well for us when the dollar to pound rate started dropping below $2/£ and at $1.50/£, was even better still. On top of all this, under UK tax law at the time, we were only taxed on 25% of our earnings since we earned virtually all our money outside the UK. And as if that wasn’t enough, we got to travel the world on the world’s greatest ship.
Yes, we did do very well, but we worked hard for it. Seven days a week, ten to fourteen hours a day, sometimes more, sometimes less, for up to seven months at a time. The world cruises did tend to be a bit less intense though and we even got the occasional free day, however, by mid January, when the world cruises started, we had usually done two or three back to back transatlantics followed by three Caribbean cruises, so it was good to be able to take a slightly more leisurely approach to our work. Even so, we would still take in excess of twenty thousand photographs during the eighty-odd days. I still remember my shore leave after my first world cruise in 1979; I slept for fourteen hours straight.
Well, that’s about it for my account of a photographer’s work-life aboard QE2; as for a photographer’s social life, well that’s a whole different chapter! What a fantastic time we had and I must say it was very hard to adjust to a life ashore after that kind of a lifestyle!
So what happened next? Can anyone take it on from here? I would be really interested to know how things moved on from here in the ships photography department.
Topic: QE2's Photography Department (Read 9927 times)
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Sep 24, 2016, 10:45 PM