How to photograph your boat
The Stitched Sailor crew · 2026-05-20 · 5 min read
Nearly every problem we run into starts with the photograph, and nearly all of it was avoidable in the ten minutes it took to walk down the dock. We can only draw what the photo shows. If the bow is cut off, we cannot invent the bow. If the whole port side is in shadow, we are guessing at the sheer line, and a guessed sheer line is the first thing an owner spots and the one thing they cannot un-see.
So: get the whole boat in the frame, with room around her. Not a tight crop, not the helm, not a three-quarter from the swim platform. Bow to transom, with a bit of air above the tower and below the waterline. Space at the edges costs nothing and gives us somewhere to work. A hull touching the frame edge has already lost a few inches of itself.
Stand square to her, roughly level with the sheer. Shooting down from a flybridge foreshortens the hull and makes her look stubby. Shooting up from a dinghy stretches the topsides and hides the waterline. Level and side-on is the view you carry in your head when you picture her, which is exactly why it is the one that ends up looking right on a shirt.
Put the light behind you. Early morning and the hour before sunset are kind: low sun, warm colour, manageable glare. Midday overhead sun flattens everything and turns white gelcoat into a blown-out shape with no lines in it. Overcast is better than most mates expect, because a grey sky is an enormous softbox and hull colour reads true under it.
Clear the frame of anything that is not the boat. Fenders over the side, a dinghy alongside, a piling in front of the bow, someone standing on the foredeck. All of it has to be drawn around or taken out, and taking it out means inventing whatever was behind it. Two minutes pulling fenders is the highest-value thing you can do before you shoot.
Take more than one. Port side, starboard side, one from a few steps further back, and one closer on the transom so the name and hailing port are legible. Send us the set. We will tell you which draws best, and if none of them will, we will say so before you pay rather than after. That conversation is free and it is a lot cheaper than a reprint.