American Cruise Lines recently invited me aboard American Constellation to shoot photos and videos for them during a 7-day Puget Sound cruise. I'm a professional photographer/videographer, as well as a licensed commercial drone pilot. I thought I would share some of the photos & videos with the ACL fans here on Cruise Critic. Hopefully, someday, some of the photos that I'm showing you here on this page will appear in brochures and other promotional material for American Cruise Lines.
This was my 57th cruise overall, but most of those have been on big cruise ships carrying thousands of passengers. A cruise on a small ship like this (there were only 100 passengers aboard the week I sailed) is very different. You get to know your fellow passengers much better, since there are only a small number of them. Once you find someone you enjoy chatting with, you tend to share a table with them at meal times and get to know them much better than you typically do with passengers on the mega cruise ships. It's a more social cruise than my big-ship cruises have been.
The other huge difference with a cruise like this is that it's not about the ship... it's about the places the ship takes you to, and which you get to explore. This cruise took me to several different small towns in the Puget Sound area that I'm sure I never would have visited if not for the ship taking me there.
An aerial shot I took of American Constellation as we approached Poulsbo, Washington.
You can see the Olympic Mountains in the distance.
The cruise began in Seattle, Washington. American Cruise Lines flew me in to Seattle the day before the cruise began, and put me up in a nice high-rise hotel for the night. This gave me a few hours to head down to Seattle's waterfront and get some aerial video and photos of the Seattle skyline from my drone.
There are very strict rules for drone pilots about where you can and cannot fly your drone. The city of Seattle has specific rules that forbid launching a drone from any public property, including parks, walkways, streets, etc. That means that you really have to launch from private property. The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates airplane and drone pilots, forbids flying drones over people. So, to stay legal, I launched my drone from the end of pier 56, and flew it over the water to get this next shot of the Seattle Great Wheel, the skyline, and (in the distance, on the left) the Space Needle.
There were about 50 of us who were staying in the hotel the night before the cruise. This is part of what ACL calls the pre-cruise package, which includes a nice breakfast in the hotel the morning of the cruise, and a bus tour of Seattle as we made our way from the hotel to where the ship was docked. During the bus tour, the bus stopped at Dr. Jose Rizal Park, which sits on a hillside with a fantastic view of Seattle. This was one of several photo opportunities during the bus ride on the way to the ship. I was able to get this photo:
Just to be clear, that was not a shot from my drone. I shot that with my Canon camera from a viewing location in the park, overlooking the city. Another stop during our bus tour was Seattle Center, the home of the Space Needle. Because this entire area is city property, I could not launch the drone from here for an aerial shot of the Space Needle... not to mention the fact that the area is crawling with people, and you can't legally fly a drone over people. So, I had to settle for a shot of the Space Needle from the ground, looking up.
Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time during our bus tour for us to actually go up to the top of the Space Needle... but that was okay, since I actually have visited Seattle before and been up to the top of the Space Needle. If you've got a lot of time to kill and would like to watch a 33-minute long travelogue I made about that previous trip, click here.
The next day, with the ship docked in Anacortes, I went on a boat excursion exploring the area near the north side of Whidbey Island. This is the Deception Pass Bridge that links Whidbey Island to the mainland of Washington. I like the photo because it really captures how beautiful the scenery was in this area. Another very scenic place the ship visited was Port Angeles, Washington. You can see the Olympic Mountains in the distance of this shot. With a big telephoto lens mounted on my Canon DSLR camera, I got this more detailed view of the mountains...
