Photographing the USS Slater

The US built nearly 600 Destroyer Escorts (DEs) in WWII. Smaller and slower than the traditional Destroyer, these ships (originally british designs) performed a very focused mission, hunting U-Boats in the Atlantic and providing escorts for the Escort Carriers (small carriers built mostly on merchant hulls.) 20 years ago, there were no DEs left afloat in the US. An effort was made to bring a ship back to the US (many DEs were provided to allied navys after WWII ended.) The Slater was in Greek service (apparently used as a barracks ship towards the end of its Greek career), and a deal was cut to bring it back to the US. The Slater arrived in NYC in 1993, and spent the next 4 years docked next to the USS Intrepid, before being brought up to Albany NY, where the Destroyer Escort Historical Museum is located today.
I recently organized a work day for members of Albany Rotary Club at the Slater. In the course of the day I got permission to come back with some camera gear and do some photography, to be shared with the Museum.
The Slater is incompletely restored. The Greeks had stripped much from it in preparation for scrapping, and hadn't really put much energy into caring for it towards the end. Enormous progress has been made, but there are areas of the ship (where no tours go) that still need a lot of work. I'm interested in these areas from the viewpoint of my artistic pretensions as a photographer, and the museum needs documentation of the unrestored areas for its own purposes. So yesterday I headed over in the morning and got started. I photographed the ceremonies associated with Destroyer Escort Day, then headed down and did some work in the two unrestored engine rooms. The latter was more exploratory, as I tried to understand conditions and do some experiments with lighting. I quickly discovered that the built in flash doesn't play well with the Tokina ultrawide zoom lens, and that the lighting in these compartments is very sketchy (most of the ships overhead fixtures aren't working in these areas.) All of this can be dealt with; the light fixtures can be repaired, and there are options like light painting (where long exposures are combined with the use of flashlights to selectively illuminate interesting things.)
This is a challenge, and it's going to take time and effort, but I'm up for it.