Rodney Campbell's Blog

Got up for a very early morning sunrise session at Homebush Bay to shoot the wreck of the SS Ayrfield. A 5AM meetup with Melbourne photographer Lachlan Downing and we were good to go.

There were absolutely no clouds about so I was expecting a pretty average sunrise but we got some nice pastels in the sky during twilight and before sunrise

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.

This is a straight long exposure (124 seconds) almost 50 minutes before sunrise with just a touch of light painting on the ship using my uber powerful LED torch. I composed for the reflection I was hoping to get on the very still water and it worked perfectly first go – in fact second attempt was also pretty good but not quite as good:)

It’s always nice to start the day with a first shot in the can

Reflections of Former Glory

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 52 mm, 124 sec at f/8, ISO 100

I’d been to this location once before a number of years ago – however that was for sunset – it’s not really ideal for either but sunrise is probably the more ideal time (with sunset the tall apartment building shadows the ship well before sunset so twilight and night shots would be the go at that end of the day)

Half an hour before sunrise and shooting at a slight angle we can see very little of the hull remains and it’s now the home of mangroves. The buildings you can see behind on the other side of the Parramatta River are from the suburb of Rhodes.

This is a manually blended exposure from two source images – the main exposure was used for the majority of the frame and a second longer exposure (double the time for an extra stop) was used for more detail in the darker ship and it’s reflection

Twilight Ayrfield

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 45 mm, 31 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Once the sun had risen it was very hard to control the highlights – I fitted the Lee BigStopper and a 3 stop Lee grad and took a number of manually bracketed long exposures (basically just started at a shorter (underexposed) shutter length and then started roughly doubling the time (using the remote trigger in bulb mode))

This is the result of doing a High Dynamic Range merge of five (5) frames roughly a stop apart (from 5 seconds to 85 seconds)

Polished Metal

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 50 mm, 21.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

A single 82 second long exposure (Lee BigStopper + Lee 0.6 Grad + CPL) with the rising sun lighting the right side of the ship and we’re looking sort of down diagonally from the direction of the sun. The CPL really helps here removing the washed out look on the side of the ship and really enhancing those colours in the patina of the ship and the leaves on the mangroves

Tree Carriage

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 44 mm, 82.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

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