Rodney Campbell's Blog

A little extra juice from a light painting session at Kirribilli on the northern side of Sydney Harbour opposite the Sydney Opera House and the city with fellow photographers (Ali and Sabine). I’d never shot a lightning strike before and had wanted to for some time… tick

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.

Lightning Orb

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 18 mm, 122.00 sec at f/11, ISO 200

Along the harbour foreshore there’s this nice little stone jetty sticking out into the water and I was hoping we could frame things up nicely for a light painting session.

It was a very overcast evening with sunset almost a bust – the weather was turning a little ominous with thunder in the far distance and some flashes of light in the sky way out west. About twenty minutes after sunset we setup for a little light painting during twilight.

My orb tool is very bright so it’s ideal to use when there’s still a little ambient light and we can shoot stopped down – I setup for a two minute exposure at f/11 and ISO 200 to give me enough time to spin the orb (30 seconds or so) and then let the rest of the time run out to soak in some of the ambient sky and city lights.

My luck was running hot this night… this was my first test capture with the orb and near the end of the extra time after doing my spin I was extremely fortunate to catch this fantastic multi branch lightning strike right over the city – better yet it fit in perfectly with my framing – the weather gods were smiling 🙂

We only got a couple more shots in before it began to rain so our light painting session was cut well short – this was the second last shot of the evening when I was going a little crazy with some light sabers (aka childrens toys)

Faerie Beams

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 122.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

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