It's still summer time, which means it's still cruise ship season. Most of the visitors are white P&O ships, but in this case we have the blue hulled Amsterdam paying a visit.

However this shot isn't exclusively about the Amsterdam. It's about the Sydney Harbour Control Tower which can be seen just behind her bow. I had heard on the news broadcast the previous night that the tower, which was built in the 1970s to control merchant shipping when Sydney Harbour was still a working harbour, is about to be demolished. It won't go down in a spectacular explosion; there is too much around it for that to be done safely. Instead it will be demolished by robotic machines, apparently. This will change the skyline quite markedly and be something of an end of an era. (Although in reality the commercial shipping has long since moved out.)

It's a pity that it couldn't be preserved, perhaps as a restaurant or something. But alas that is not to be and soon enough it will be gone. I decided to frame the Amsterdam between the light poles and pylons running down the side of the wharf as a sort of echo of the control tower. And I left the seagull in just because I could.

This is in fact an HDR composition of five images. The light is a little bit difficult at that time of the morning.