Rodney Campbell's Blog

Within the Sydney Olympic Park precinct lies “The Brickpit“. This location allowed me to try out my new Sigma 15mm f/2.8 fisheye lens to take this stitched panorama image.

The award-winning Ring Walk is a soaring circular walkway (18.5 metres high and 550 metres long) around the Brickpit ‘pond’. The pond is also the home of the endangered Green and Golden Bell Frog.

I’d never visited this location before and I met some other photographically minded friends here just an hour after sunrise. I took the opportunity to shoot this handheld set of images for the panorama.

Note: This panorama looks much better when larger – so click on the image below to see a much larger version in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer

This is actually an HDR Panorama composed of five (5) sets of three (3) exposure bracketed images.

The Brickpit

NIKON D600 + 15.0 mm f/2.8 @ 15 mm, 1/50 sec at f/8, ISO 100

For our fourth model shoot at the Google Plus Centennial Park PicANiK we had another impromptu guest model. This time we had a very flexible young lady who was a ballerina, dancer and trapeze artist – so we figured we’ve got all these Nikon speedlights, light stands, light modifiers and a lovely dancer so it was time to try and emulate (however poorly) the legendary Joe McNally.

Note: These photographs (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.

The Dancer

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 30 mm, 1/800 sec at f/5.6, ISO 400

Huge props to Stephen Godfrey for setting up the lighting. Softboxes on the left and right with a zoomed bare flash on the ground behind our leaping model to provide a rim light – all three running on Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (CLS) and in Auto-FP High Speed Sync.

With our very athletic model doing leaps, spins, splits and pirouettes over a spot we’d marked on the ground as the ideal target location for her – we were left trying to get a dozen Nikon shooters to only work one at a time so they weren’t all stealing the flash 🙂

When I got my turn to shoot I got down low on the ground and close to the danger zone with a wide lens and triggered using my SB-900 running in master/commander mode on the camera hotshoe.

What do you think – probably not worthy of a Joe McNally second look but I was pretty happy for my first attempt at this and a multi light setup…