Rodney Campbell's Blog

I joined two long time photography buddies for a sunset shoot at Tamarama (a small beach on the coast just around from Sydney’s famous Bondi beach).

We were expecting absolutely no clouds (a prediction which proved to be true for the time leading up to and just after sunset at least) so were hoping for some nice pastel tones in the sky looking out to the sea on the east away from the setting sun.

Thankfully Gerry lent me his 17-55/2.8 lens to use for the afternoon/evening (he used his 11-16/2.8) since my D600 is still being repaired and whilst I kept my old D7000 camera I sold all of my crop sensor wide angle lenses. The 17mm end isn’t all that wide (26mm equivalent) – especially compared to my 16mm on full frame with the 16-35 but I was truly thankful for the use of a good piece of glass.

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.

The large rock shelf around the point at the northern end of the beach proved to be an ok location for some high tide wave action over the rocks

Pastel Dreaming

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-55.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 100

I was attempting to work in the nice green seaweed that was in abundance inside this crevasse in the rockshelf and have the leading lines of the gaps work through the frame. There were at least two quite tricky parts to this scene – 1) dealing with the massive exposure difference between the dark depths of the water and the sides of the chasm below me and the foreground rocks out to the sky (the later was dealt with using an ND grad) but I had to use bracketed exposures to blend in the foreground with the dark hole and 2) timing the water movement so that when the water was out and the seaweed was exposed vs having water flowing over the rocks – in the end I ended up taking twelve different exposures with different exposure settings and different levels of water movement and used four to blend for the final result

Dreamy Green

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-55.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 10.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

After the sun had set the clouds started coming over from the west towards us and then out to sea – too much too late :). Still the really interesting textures of the weathered and textured wavy rock formations and little pools filled with reflective water made for some interesting compositions looking south west (about 25 minutes after sunset)

The light from twilight was dropping fast so I was chasing the exposure on these ones…

Moonscape on Earth

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-55.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 15 sec at f/9, ISO 400

Purple Daze

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-55.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 221 sec at f/9, ISO 200

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