Rodney Campbell's Blog

Over the weekend my wife participated in the Sydney Coastrek 50-100km Team Challenge in aid of the Fred Hollows Foundation.

My wife walked the 50km Night Event which involves a walk throughout the night from Balmoral Beach to Coogee via the Sydney coastline and harbour foreshore, starting at 6PM at Balmoral and her team finished just around 7AM the next morning.

I must firstly say how very proud I am of her entering and finishing this grueling challenge (but don’t tell her that :)) – especially for someone who’s never participated in sport, etc. They had pretty wild weather here in Sydney over the weekend so it rained fairly extensively for much of their time out and they had ferocious ocean winds for their trip along the southern coastline from South head down to Coogee. I’m really pleased she worked so hard and persevered to the end – even if they were literally completely wrecked by the finish.

I was picking the team up from the finish of the walk at Coogee and since I was getting up at 4AM and going to be there before sunrise I figured I might as well take my camera gear just in case – you know how it is :)… It was a wet and windy morning and the sky was thick with grey cloud so there was no actual sunrise to speak of and no colour in the sky but since this ocean pool was a mere 50 metres from the finishing area I figured I’d try a few quick compositions whilst I was waiting for them to arrive.

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 one was taken at 6:20AM from the top of the steps leading down to the pool looking South along the coast with Coogee beach there on the left

Blue Dawn

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 30 sec at f/11, ISO 100

The morning was pea soup grey muck so since the images were all fairly monochromatic anyway I’ve taken it the whole way… 6:50AM and just after the supposed sunrise…

Coogee in Grey

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 1.60 sec at f/16, ISO 100

and here is what the finishing line looked like earlier when I first arrived (around 6AM) and I was doing a little setup testing to try and balance ambient sky with the flash. When I found out my wifes team wasn’t going to arrive for a while I decided to see what was in the area – and found the pool…

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 1/10 sec at f/5, ISO 2000

Finally Coastrek participants are raising money to support the Fred Hollows Foundation in their work to restore sight to the needlessly blind (right now, 4 out of 5 people who are blind in the developing world do not need to be). So if you’d like to support their work then you can of course still make a tax deductible donation to sponsor my wife on her sponsor page at: http://www.coastrekfundraising.com.au/louisecampbell

Don't forget to Share...

Google

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Pinterest

Email

Print