SAIL Amsterdam comes round every five years, and it opens with the Sail-In - the tall ships coming up the IJ from IJmuiden in one long parade, with the city out on both banks to watch. In 2025 that was Wednesday 20 August: the tenth SAIL, in Amsterdam’s 750th year.
I went with a camera and no brief. What I was after was the scale of it - not a portrait of one ship, but the whole waterway at once, the banks packed solid and what looked like every small boat in the Netherlands out on the water.
An event this size is hard to photograph honestly. Down at the water you get one hull filling the frame and no sense of what’s actually going on around it. The scale is the story, and from inside the crowd the scale is invisible.
The light was no help either: a bright, hazy August afternoon, flat over open water, with the ships moving slowly and the small boats moving a good deal faster.
So I shot it from height, looking down the length of the IJ. From up there the parade reads as one thing - the ships coming through, the flotilla closing in around them, both banks solid with people.
Then longer lenses to pull single ships back out of the mass: Dar Młodziezy and Alexander von Humboldt II lying together, a Spanish galleon under full colours, a crew standing out along the yards as they came past the EYE.
Nothing came of this beyond the photographs themselves - no client, no brief. SAIL comes round once every five years, and this is what the first day of it looked like.
