Rodney Campbell's Blog

A little lunchtime street photography wandering with the 85/1.4…

I was diggin’ the interplay of light and shadow, reflection, lines and form on the new ANZ corporate building here in the CBD

It’s about Light

NIKON D600 + 85.0 mm f/1.4 @ 85 mm, 1/500 sec at f/8, ISO 100

I joined Gerry and Cameron for a sunrise session at South Maroubra Beach. In short… ugly morning 🙂

We arrived just after 5AM and headed out onto the beach and around the rocky southern headland looking for some interesting compositions in the dark. We could see there was very very heavy black clouds on the horizon so it wasn’t looking good for a colourful sunrise and it only got worse from there… it began to rain. So we looked around on the rocks for some compositions but weren’t willing to get the camera’s out yet in the rain.

Sunrise was basically a bust – it went from black to dark grey to not much else. It wasn’t till about 10 minutes after sunrise that we started to get a hint of colour and interest in the sky. By then I’d headed back to the beach to try my luck with the lines of rocks leading out into the ocean.

This one is about 15 minutes after sunrise and with a little boost in ISO I was getting some nice shutter speeds for some good water flow – you had to be patient tho since the decent waves were few and far between.

Vortex of Light and Water

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 200

This vertical pano crop was a suggestion from Gerry – it’s actually a different image to the one he suggested it for, however the scene was similar – this one is a touch wider and from a lower point of view looking a little more straight out rather than angled down but hopefully the suggestion still applies and works 🙂

Maroubra in a Spin

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 200

and then the heavy black clouds moved across covering half the sky…

I tried a number of compo’s in the intervening time but nothing was really working for me

A selfie 45 minutes after sunrise and just before it was BigStopper time

Views of Maroubra

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 35 mm, 1/2 sec at f/11, ISO 100

A lunchtime CBD photowalk with some friends from the G+ community.

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.

An interesting looking eating establishment in Chinatown

Old Town

NIKON D600 + 20.0 mm f/2.8 @ 20 mm, 1/25 sec at f/2.8, ISO 100

Caffeine

NIKON D600 + 20.0 mm f/2.8 @ 20 mm, 1/20 sec at f/4, ISO 450

and a little handheld wide angle stuff at the end of the day on the way home – an interesting view looking up through the porthole in the building up at the skyscrapers towering above

Porthole

NIKON D600 + 20.0 mm f/2.8 @ 20 mm, 1/50 sec at f/5, ISO 100

I’ll start by admitting that I’m absolutely stunned that this spur of the moment HDR Vertorama even worked at any level let alone as well as it did…

It was taken during a lunchtime CBD photowalk with some friends from the G+ community. I’d expected some general street photography so had just brought my D600 with my antique looking but very compact and very wide Nikon 20mm f/2.8 lens. This lens hails from the analog era of the 1980’s so it has no modern goodies and is frankly pretty ordinary optically compared to modern lenses – no nano crystal coating, no CAD assisted lens design and so on. So it’s very wide (20mm on full frame – so imagine a fixed 13mm prime on your regular crop sensor body) and has it’s fair share of distortion, flare and CA. However what it does have is very compact size and weight – it’s tiny.

Anyway it’s what I had on the camera when the group decided to take a look inside St Andrew’s Cathedral, which is a beautiful church in the heart of the city. We looked around for image opportunities inside and since remarkably there were very few people inside I decided to go for broke and try and multi bracketed set for a handheld HDR vertorama.

This involved hand holding eight sets of three bracketed images – basically standing at the lectern in the middle of the church starting facing slightly down towards the floor in one direction down the length of the church and then step by step swivelling up and over and behind me down to the floor facing in the other direction. It was very dark inside the church of course so I’m shooting wide open at f/2.8 and then praying I can handhold all 24 shots still at 1/20th of a second at high ISO and do the moves well enough by eye to have an aligned result over the 24 frames as I rotate vertically over 200+ degrees…. Yeah I wasn’t hopeful either and said as much to Ali when I was taking them – mentioning I only had to stuff one of the 24 frames to wreck the whole thing.

Still I first did some basic RAW processing of the source frames in Lightroom before then HDR blending the bracketed sets and then panorama stitched those images into the vertorama you see here. Remarkably the alignment even handheld was damn good – the result here is straight out of stitching – no corrections or warping otherwise applied.

The Bendy Cathedral

NIKON D600 + 20.0 mm f/2.8 @ 20 mm, 1/20 sec at f/2.8, ISO 450

After the sun had set and it was well into twilight it was a chance to try some longer exposures at Bondi beach. We had this fabulous glowing light – unfortunately it wasn’t off at the horizon but it was directly above us – the clouds above our head glowed deep pink and it’s soft warm light made the whole area around us just “glow” – it only lasted a minute or two but it was gorgeous light.

Faerie Light

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 15 sec at f/11, ISO 100

The final image taken this evening before packing up and heading off to dinner. By this time it was about half an hour after sunset so it was fairly dark but the sky and clouds still had this deep purple colour. Whilst I like the colour version I also produced a monochrome conversion from the same image which I think works for me

Bondi Colours

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 20.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Bondi Light

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 20.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100