Can you take stock photos on a cruise?

Back last November and December, my wife and I flew to Sydney to join a cruise ship (with Celebrity cruises) down the east coast of Australia, across to the South Island of New Zealand and around the southern tip and back up the east coast of NZ to end in Auckland. It was a wedding anniversary trip and really enjoyable (I would truly recommend Celebrity for a cruise like this), but I had questions in my mind about whether the organized day trips would be good for a stock photographer. Obviously, I’m back now and have been through the 3871 images I managed to take in the 3 weeks we were away. To be honest, some of these were panoramas, some HDR shots, so it wasn’t as extreme as it sounds. I took two bodies and my full set of lenses with me (the second body being the Canon Rebel T3i which I bought for its very small size) and had my tripod as well for land based shots. So I was prepared! Out of all those images, I edited it down to 653 images that I really liked and thought had some potential for stock, and in that batch I decided that 280 were better suited for RM on Alamy, Corbis and my own site, BackyardStockPhotos. As I’ve outlined before, I’ve decided that I have enough images now on the main microstock sites (around 5000 on Shutterstock, for instance) that I can afford to try different approaches with my new images, and so I’m taking images that I think could be saleable, including people to add some action to the shot, including art works where they are important, and putting those under an RM license on Alamy and Corbis and on my own site under an editorial license. In summary, this trip netted 370 RF shots and 280 RM images.

When I think about shots I took on the trip, quite a number were taken on land either before the cruise started (in Australia) or on the day trips. Being on land under your own control is obviously the best approach as you can be up for sunrise:
Sunrise behind Sydney Opera House
Or, indeed at sunset:
Sunset in Sydney
But, the cruise was actually OK for some stock shots. These fell into three main categories – the detail shots that are not really identifiable as being on a particular ship:
Christmas Tree on cruise ship
Then there are the shots that I managed to get from the ship itself as we went into port or into the various Sounds on the South Island:
Milford Sound, South Island, New Zealand
Finally, there are the day trips. Trips around a city are fine, you get to see some interesting buildings, but the light is as you find it – no chance of waiting until dusk, for instance. The trips to see the countryside are harder on a stock photographer – you get put off at a viewing point, and you have to take the shot alongside your passengers. I went on a train trip into the mountains, which was fun, but the one open car was packed with people trying to get their holiday shots, so there was a bit of tension as I doggedly hung onto my spot by an open window!
Taieri Gorge Railway

You can see a general idea of the shots I took by searching on BackyardStockPhotos – here are the New Zealand shots.
Would the trip have paid for itself in stock sales – I very much doubt it! I did enjoy it as a vacation, could set the costs against my business for tax purposes as I took thousands of images for my stock business, which is also good, and I’m planning another cruise between Germany and Budapest (a river cruise) later this summer, so I guess that tells you all you need to know!