Rodney Campbell's Blog

NIKON D90 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/25 sec at f/13, ISO 200

For the shot above I first picked some magnolia flower petals and then froze them in a shallow container of water and then shot the block of ice backlit.

The method I used for this was:
– find a shaded but bright area of our deck to work on
– and place a silver reflector on the ground
– on top of the reflector I placed a large square transparent tub (it was about 50cm by 50cm and about 20cm deep) upside down
– place the tripod with camera (with 90mm macro lens – however at this distance a macro isn’t required) directly over the upturned tub
– put the block of ice on the centre of the tub

As I was aiming to take an image of the flowers embedded in the ice and I had all this setup I figured I might as well also take a timelapse sequence of images of the block of ice with flower petals embedded within as it was melting.

The idea is to allow the soft reflected light to backlight the ice and flowers within (sort of like a poor mans light box); I also didn’t do this in the bright sun because both the white balance and exposure would swing too widely if clouds passed over the sun, etc.

The following is the timelapse movie which is the result of 330 images taken at 30 second intervals.

Some photographer friends and I made our way to North Bondi in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs for a sunset photo shoot (sunrises are getting just a tad too early for us at this time of year :))

It was looking like it was going to be a pretty uninspiring shoot only an hour or two beforehand with very overcast skies and even the threat of a little rain… but somehow miraculously it cleared in time and left us with a smattering of interesting clouds and colour for a fairly spectacular sunset show.

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

This first was taken with my ten stop neutral density filter

Ten Stop Dreaming

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-50.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 30 sec at f/8, ISO 100 + ND3.0

Counter Swirls

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-50.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 1.6 sec at f/13, ISO 100 + 0.9GND

Puffs and Stripes

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 1.6 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Streaming II

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 100

can anyone tell this is the HDR processed image (actually it was an exposure fusion not tone mapping)…

Bondi Waiting

NIKON D7000 + @ 8 mm, 1/2 sec at f/9, ISO 100

This last image was taken well after sunset (6PM) with a two minute exposure to get a really milky ocean so the large boulder would float in the mist (thanks Suren) – and also my favourite image from the day…

Floating

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-50.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 120 sec at f/16, ISO 100 + 0.9GND

one thing I only noticed during post processing is how close the rock shelves and waves look in the images even though we were positioned high up on the cliffs above – even at 8mm I wasn’t really expecting that…