Rodney Campbell's Blog

I recently posted an image I’d taken of the SS Ayrfield shipwreck at Homebush Bay almost 50 minutes before sunrise. Today I wanted to walk you through some of the Behind The Scenes thinking for the shot.

BTS: Reflections of Former Glory

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 52 mm, 124.00 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Teaching Point: there are a couple of teaching points for today

1) Composition: The sky was fairly uninteresting (as far as clouds go) so I was hoping for the ship and it’s reflection to be sitting completely within a nice pastel toned area (with the tones of the sky being reflected in the very still water). So I opted for a front on symmetric composition for this shot with a slightly longer focal length and a fairly tight crop on the ship

2) Seconds to Minutes: The top exposure in the image here is my test shot. Once the camera was on the tripod and setup (manual focus (in this case on the front of the ship), framing right, appropriate aperture for DoF/sharpness (f/8 here)) I took a test shot at a forced high ISO of 6400 (using Aperture Priority). This came out at 2 seconds – the reason I used ISO 6400 is that it’s exactly 6 stops from ISO 100 and that means I can use an easy conversion of seconds to minutes when I switch from ISO 6400 to ISO 100. Thus I could calculate that my desired exposure at ISO 100 would be around 2 minutes

On that test shot – the top image is essentially straight out of camera with just some minor adjustments like noise reduction and sharpening in Lightroom – it looks pretty great already – hard to believe it’s at ISO 6400 and you’ll probably need to view it large to even see the noise

3) Light: I could see in the test shot on the back of my camera that the right side of the ship especially was lacking detail and in serious darkness (the left side was being lit somewhat by some flood lights on shore). I knew looking at this that I had to add some light to the ship for my final image so I used a high power torch to paint some light onto the ship (mostly from the far right) during the long exposure. The trick with light painting like this is to keep the light moving, don’t light from directly from the camera position (so the light has shadow and depth) and not to overlight

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