Rodney Campbell's Blog

Turimetta Beach at Warriewood on the Sydney Northern Beaches is one of Sydney’s most favourite seascape photographic locations – every weekend sunrise will see it’s rocky shores crowded with photographers looking for something, anything, different. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fabulous location – it’s just been shot to death and with so many people there every day it’s much trickier to setup shots without other people in them

Alas our friend Suren had never shot Turimetta before so Gerry, Suren and I found ourselves here one Sunday morning

It was a lovely morning to be out – not too early at this time of the year – we parked above the beach around 5:45AM; and the weather was kind – not raining although a little cool. What was however disappointing was the clear sky above and a very heavy band of cloud right on the horizon which would effectively kill off any chance of a good (photographically speaking) 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.

It was low tide so we headed around the southern end of the beach and actually walked past where everyone shoots at Turimetta and instead made our way all the way down to North Narrabeen Tidal Pool

I’d only shot at this location once before but this time I was keen to shoot from up on the cliffs overlooking the pool and the ocean, to do the only shot that’s really available up there – a wide stitched panorama. My good friend Gerry reckons this would be a better sunset pano location and he’s probably right – still I had to give it a try and was hoping for some nice pre dawn twilight action

Meanwhile Gerry had headed right out to the edge of the reef past the pool where the fishermen were to try his luck out there, and Suren worked his way back along the coast to the left to Turimetta to shoot there

First up a stitched panorama composed from nine (9) frames taken around 6:30AM (about 25 minutes before sunrise). This one covers a little over a 200º field of view. I had to adjust the exposure on the way around – the area towards where sunrise would be on the left was still a lot brighter than over to the right (looking away from the sun) so the exposure times varied from 10 seconds to over 30 seconds per frame

‘Been Dreaming of Sunrise

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 31.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Even now you could tell sunrise was going to be ordinary – we had moments of nice blushes of pastel colour in the sky like this, but that heavy cloud sitting right on the horizon and no cloud in the upper sky above was going to mean no actual colourful sunrise was going to happen – it would just get progressively lighter

I then moved down to the corner of the cliff right above the pool – this allowed me to shot almost 240º looking north along the cliff on the left right around to the west looking inland on the right

It was getting very light with less than ten minutes to sunrise, nice pastel skies were all we’d get with this ten (10) frame stitched panorama

Narrabeen Views

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 4 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Sunrise was gonna be a bust so I headed back down off the cliff and around down to the rock shelf below to head back along the coast towards Turimetta. I found Gerry doing the same thing and I met him just as we got back to where Suren was, pretty much around the time sunrise was supposed to be happening… and… well.. nothing…

The other early morning photographers were already packing up and leaving, but as we’d technically just arrived (at this spot) we figured we see if we could extract something from nothing… I was hoping for a second chance sunrise when the sun breached the heavy clouds on the horizon

Surge

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 100

About 15 minutes after sunrise we started to get a little colour in the tops of the distant cloud cover along with some reverse god rays as the sun was trying to break through. I’d setup this composition looking down this rock shelf with the cracks and the channels of water sort of leading to the rising sun. Then it was just down to timing of the waves and the swirling water flows below and a nice shutter speed to show the motion without blurring it too much. Shot with the Heliopan CPL and a 3 stop Hitech Reverse Grad

Something from Nothing

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 18 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Once the sun started breaching the top of the cloud it was getting very bright so I stacked an addition 2 stop Grad ND with the 3 stop reverse and CPL to finish off the morning session before heading back to the cars and off to a local eatery for a well earned breakfast

Turimetta Rays

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 1/1 sec at f/11, ISO 100

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