Hamburg in one picture.

Now, the Queen Mary 2 may be a British cruise ship, with a home port of Southampton and a port of registry of Hamilton, but she belongs to the city of Hamburg. No other ship gathers as big a croud every single time it visits as the QM2. Every citizen who lives close to the Elbe river knows and recognizes the sound of her horns. Whenever the Queen goes into drydock for a while, we stop by and say hello.

And there isn’t a more iconic drydock than the Blohm + Voss Dock Elbe 17. It is mentioned in songs, printed on T-Shirts, postcards and pictures and we see it every time we walk along the Elbe river. Even when no ship is docked, the large letters themselves have become a landmark of Hamburg.

The Dock is located opposite the St. Pauli Landungsbrücken, the third major landmark that can be seen in the picture. The clocktower on the right is part of the Landungsbrücken and has been showing locals and sailors the time for over 100 years.

Taking this photo was a lot of fun. I knew the Queen Mary 2 was in Drydock and I new exactly where a good place to take a photo was - on top of the Landungsbrücken Subway Station. But so did dozens of other photographers. We all stood in the same place with our cameras and tripods and waited for the sun to set and the light in the clocktower to turn on. I like to believe that we all still took hugely different pictures.