Rodney Campbell's Blog

I’d briefly shot a single test frame from this location a couple of years ago in the morning but now I’m finally back to try some stitched panorama’s encompassing the massive Anzac Bridge with the Sydney CBD directly behind. The Anzac Bridge is the longest span cable-stayed bridge in Australia and it replaced the adjacent old Glebe Island bridge and joins the city to the suburbs to the west. On the 80th anniversary of Armistice Day, the 11th November 1998, the new bridge was renamed as the ANZAC Bridge as a memorial to members from both sides of the Tasman who formed the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

I was dropping my eldest off to yet another birthday party late one afternoon so I took the opportunity again to do some sunset and twilight photography somewhere different. As the party was at the inner city suburb of Rozelle I was originally intending to shoot sunset somewhere in Balmain but just after drop off I could see the Anzac bridge close by so decided to divert there.

There’s a nice set of walkways over the major roads which give a pretty good view of the Anzac bridge and the Sydney CBD skyline. I actually wanted to be more to the left than where I shot this from however that wasn’t possible as the pedestrian bridge to the left of me had a high metal mesh blocking the view above the freeway lanes.

This location is quite a long way from the bridge and the city so I opted for my goto landscape lens (jokes :)) – the Sigma 85/1.4 – and decided to use the longer focal length to produce a more compressed stitched panorama of the scene rather than taking a single shot with a wide lens (which would have given a much less interesting thinner view).

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.

Of course we had no clouds and no real interesting colour to speak of during sunset, although we did get some nice pastel bands early on

Pastel City

NIKON D600 + 85.0 mm f/1.4 @ 85 mm, 4 sec at f/11, ISO 100

My favourite however was to wait till we were well into twilight when the city lights were on and we could see the streaking lights of the cars crossing the bridge – a bit over half an hour after sunset and we’re right in the peak of blue hour…

Anzac Blue

NIKON D600 + 85.0 mm f/1.4 @ 85 mm, 30 sec at f/9, ISO 100

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