Rodney Campbell's Blog

Headed out with Gerry and Suren for an evening of light painting in a very interesting forest. This was a plantation of nice straight trees planted in very straight lines with fabulous tall straight silvery trunks without branches topped with a canopy of large leaved foliage at the top.

We had dinner in a nearby town (won’t bother with a rating :)) and then headed to the forest for a little sunset action before it got dark. The window for images at sunset was ridiculously short – Suren missed it setting up his camera!

The rows of trees were quite interesting but the ground level was often messy and I found it hard to create interesting compositions whilst it was still light. We all wandered separately through the forest of trees looking for something to catch our eye.

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 single image view is pretty much what the place looked like – although this was one of the nicer rows with nice trees, a good canopy and relatively even grass coverage across the bottom (in fact this is the row we came back to later for light painting)

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 2.50 sec at f/13, ISO 100

Whilst everyone (including me) was trying horizontal pano’s I decided to try something radical with a vertical pano – this is composed from 7 horizontal shots taken (at 16mm) from pointing downwards in front of the tripod and then moving upwards and over the top and back down behind me to the ground

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 8 sec at f/8, ISO 800

We’d finished shooting the trees at sunset and twilight and were heading back towards the car to grab our gear to do some lightpainting. There was a sporting field on the left which was very well lit by strong flood lights which spilled onto the closer trees but quickly fell off into the darkness of the rows. Tried a couple compositions but settled on this one with the swathe of white clover flowers covering the foreground which I selectively light painted from the same direction as the flood lit field using a torch and a long exposure to reveal the strong blue twilight sky.

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 30 sec at f/11, ISO 200

Finally one of the horizontal pano’s I’d taken on sunset – composed of 13 vertical frames taken at 30mm – admittedly it does look better larger (and it’s almost 30,000 pixels wide)

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 30 mm, 1/8 sec at f/13, ISO 400

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