24 http://www.amateurphotographer.co.ukPhoto Stories
O
n 12 March, the day that the WHO
declared the Coronavirus to be a
pandemic, the Holland America
Line cruise ship MS Noordam set
sail from Tauranga in the South Paci c. All the
passengers had disembarked and she was
returning to the US to repatriate the multi-
national crew to their home nations. Little did
they know that the world was about to close
its ports to the world’s ships, leaving the
estimated 100,000 crew members stranded
on board for weeks and months.
One of those was Glaswegian Claire
Macdonald, who worked in the on-board shop.
‘It was ne at rst,’ recalls Claire. ‘Holland
America had gone out of its way to make us
comfortable. But then the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
imposed all these strict rules.’
Things got even tougher when European and
US crew on eight HAL ships in the Paci c were
transferred onto the Koningsdam to keep them
together to make it easier to get them home.
‘Now there were eight communities aboard
that all had to be kept separated. Even though
we’d been cut off from the outside world for
weeks on our respective ships, and clearly no
one had the virus, the CDC ordered us to
isolate in our cabins and were only allowed
out – with masks and social distancing – for
meals and twice daily temperature checks.’
Despite these measures, when they got there
the US only allowed American citizens off.
Claire was at her lowest point during this
period. ‘I got very bored being con ned to a
small cabin with very limited internet access,’
she admits, ‘but at least I had a window.’ She
had taken pictures of herself and realised
that she could do something with them in
Photoshop to keep herself occupied. Claire
has a photographic background and had
previously worked as a ships’ photographer.
She went through her photos and found a
nice sunset that she had previously taken,
using her Nikon D7500 and 18-140mm lens,
and comped them together. Having enjoyed
the distraction, she looked for more suitable
backgrounds and downloaded a selection ofimages from a royalty-free stock website, then
began creating a series of montages each
more fantastical than the last.
‘The sunset shot is not that different from
sunset sel es I have taken up on the deck,’
she admits, ‘but though you get to see some
incredible night skies in the middle of the
ocean, miles from anywhere, it’s impossible to
photograph them like this on a moving ship.’
Her next montage imagined being beneath
the waves, watching dolphins playing outside
her window. ‘I had comments on social media
asking which ship I was on that had such an
amazing undersea window,’ she laughs. The
re image was the most challenging. ‘I had to
watch a lot of tutorials for that one and it took
me ages to get it looking right. Fortunately
time was something that I had plenty of.’Finally, terra rma
Suddenly, on 20 May, the ship was given
permission to dock in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico,
from where a chartered plane was waiting to
take them home.
‘It was midnight when we eventually left the
ship,’ she recounts. ‘It was the rst time I
had set foot on dry land for 70 days. We were
surrrounded by men in hazmat suits with
sniffer dogs who checked our luggage and
hosed it down with disinfectant, while a pack
of press photographers were taking pictures
of us. We felt like diseased criminals.’
The crew were herded onto buses and
driven, with a full police escort, to a deserted
airstrip from where a solitary plane was
waiting to take them home, on the rst leg of
what would be a 60-hour journey.
Now back home in Glasgow with her family
Claire’s thoughts are with all her shipmates
still on board – the deck of cers and
engineers who have to look after the ships,
and the tens of thousands of crew who are
still unable to return home despite the fact
that only a small number of cruiseships have
ever had an outbreak of Covid-19. ‘Not that
you’d get that impression from the distorted
coverage the cruise industry has been
getting in the media,’ she laments.Stranded at sea
in lockdown
Claire Macdonald spent 70 days at sea when
Covid-19 went global. Luckily she had her camera
and a Photoshop subscription for company
‘Skies like this are frequent
at sea but hard to capture. I
wanted to show what people
can experience out in the
open ocean’