Two of Cunard's new "Queen" liners have been in town for the last couple of days; the retrospectively-named Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary 2. I considered going in to do a shoot like the one that I had done for the last visit of the Queen Elizabeth 2, the Queen Elizabeth's predecessor.

(Perhaps Cunard thought that "3" lacked a certain style and therefore decided to revert to the name used by the original Queen Elizabeth from the 1930's to 1960's. That ship met a less than glorious (and suspicious) end, scuttled in Hong Kong harbour after a fire.)

However I couldn't quite muster the enthusiasm of lugging the tripod in to the city, carting it off to the office and then having it tag along on the peak hour ride home so that I could do a proper shoot, so instead I opted to just take the 40D in and shoot hand held. (Which may have worked better if I had noticed that the IS on the 24-105 was off before I'd done about 3/4 of the shoot, grrr!)

In any case it wouldn't have been worthwhile. I thought that the Queen Mary 2 was moored near the harbour but she was way, way down the far end of the Sydney Fleet Base in Woolloomooloo Bay and I would have had to high tail it all the way across to the other side of the Botanic Gardens to be able to see her. (If you ignore one shot of her funnel and superstructure taken through the trees.) Most of my shots were therefore of Queen Elizabeth. (Enough for a new gallery, which I'll put up in due course.)

Queen Elizabeth's stats are 90,900 GRT, 964.5 feet (say 294 metres) long, 23.7 knots, 2,068 passengers and 996 crew. Here she appears just as dawn is beginning to break to the east (right of frame), her bow framing the Sydney Opera House.

Edit from December 2023: I had completely forgotten about this shoot, and in reality still don't remember doing it. When I saw the keyword tag "Queen Elizabeth" I thought that I had mistagged the QE2. Indeed I had forgotten that there WAS a new Queen Elizabeth and while I remembered my QE2 Final Visit gallery... I had failed to realise that it was done over 3 years before this shot. Sigh. The time, it goes...)

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