Rodney Campbell's Blog

We had smoke filled skies in Sydney yet again yesterday so I headed to Bradleys Head expecting a very red sunset. I was aiming to shoot from the rocks down on the water at the point looking across towards the city and the setting sun behind it.

On the drive down along the headland towards the point I spied to my right a fiery ball in a sky filled with red smoke haze and a bright orange reflection across the water below. I pulled over and grabbed my gear and headed out to look for a spot where I could shoot with a couple silhouetted trees looking down on the scene below.

I actually took a number of bracketed shots (both for exposure and for focus) for this scene and I was expecting to need to do a HDR to cope with the brightness of the sun in the frame along with a focus stack of the foreground branches and the distant city (I was shooting at maximum focal length for the lenses I had with me – 70mm in this case). In the end however I liked this particular single frame and the depth of field was more than adequate even at f/9 (the trees were quite a long way away) and because the sun was behind a very heavy bank of smoke it didn’t blow out too much and this end result gave me more of the feel I had when I was standing there in awe of the scene below.

My thoughts go to the now many affected by the fires in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney – more than 200 homes lost and more than 100 more severely damaged! and wednesday is shaping up to be another horror day 🙁

Angry Red

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm, 1/100 sec at f/9, ISO 100

I actually wanted to try some more compositions with twisty foreground trees filling most of the frame, backlit by the red landscape but time was pressing and I wanted to be down on the water in time to setup for sunset…

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