Rodney Campbell's Blog

I knew in advance that every friday night there were fireworks on the beach next to the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort and that we’d have a great view of them from our living room and balcony of our hotel (one of the reasons I’d requested a room on this side)

With this in mind we had dinner in our dining room in plenty of time for the 7:45PM kickoff. The rest of the family relaxed inside and watched through our panoramic living room windows which looked straight out over this. I’d setup on the balcony earlier and taken in a very nice sunset along with twilight and the blue which followed

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.

Sunset in Paradise

Paradise Blue

Personally I wished they’d run the fireworks about twenty five minutes earlier (when the above image was taken) so that we could have had some twilight blue sky to go along with the lit buildings and the fireworks display – but alas the fireworks started right on time at 7:45 about 50 minutes after sunset and twilight had pretty much faded from the sky

Seeing Red

Hilton Fire

Fire Away

The show was good (fireworks are always a winner with the kids… and kids at heart :)) and I found with timing some longer exposures I could add a little more (light pollution) colour to the sky

Fireworks in Paradise

This session high above Sydney Harbour was a long long time in the making…

There’s a fantastic public lookout on the top of one of the four Sydney Harbour Bridge Pylons

Access is via the pedestrian pathway on the Eastern side of the Bridge – from there you enter the South East Pylon and can make the climb to the top (entry currently is $13)

The great thing about this lookout is that you get a fantastic view of the city and Sydney harbour from high above and I’d wanted to shoot sunset from here for some time

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.

Stitched from eight (8) frames taken handheld at 16mm with a Hitech 0.9 Reverse GND

Pastel Harbour

© Rodney Campbell

There is however one very big downside to this location – for the whole year it closes at 5PM sharp every day, which means for the vast majority of the year it closes well before sunset. In fact there’s only a small window of opportunity during the year where sunset occurs before 5PM with enough time to shoot sunset before you’re asked to leave 🙂

So it was almost a year ago that the plans were in motion to come back during the dead of winter when the days were short and the lack of daylight savings meant sunset would occur a mere few minutes before 5PM – that time is now…

I was meeting friends for an evening photowalk on the northern side of the harbour near Luna Park at 6:30PM anyway, so I left work a little early and drove down to The Rocks and parked near the city side end of the pedestrian walkway and made my way onto the bridge and up to the lookout at the top

Whilst driving here I could see there were almost no clouds in the sky except for a small amount on the horizon and probably heaviest out towards the west, so I wasn’t expecting a brilliant sky but I was somewhat hopeful for a show of pastel tones around sunset

I was most interested in taking some stitched panoramas of Sydney Harbour from up there and I was originally intending doing this on my tripod as I usually do. However a number of things made this impossible:
– the lookout area is very large – a rectangular walkway around the top of the pylon which is at least 5 metres wide by perhaps 10 metres long
– the outer wall of the lookout area is quite tall – well above tripod height and above the wall is a foot of clear glass
– just inside the outer wall is a sort of steel bench which goes most of the way around – great to stand on to see over the glass but not wide enough for a tripod

I needed to shoot pretty quickly anyway since I’d only get a few minutes around sunset so I decided to simply walk around the top area to take the overlapping frames and shoot them handheld (and parallax be damned :))

My first pano attempt – 4:40PM and it’s 16 minutes to sunset – I actually took enough frames for a full 360º pano but decided to only stitch this portion of the view (plus the parallax errors introduced by the closer portions of the bridge and the pylon to the west of us caused lots of issues). This view looks north over the Harbour Bridge on the left through Sydney Harbour out to sea and then across the Sydney city and around to the setting sun just behind the other southern pylon to the west on the right

Stitched from nine (9) frames taken handheld at 16mm with a Lee 0.9 GND

Harbour Sets

By the time the sun was setting it was getting pretty dark so I had to push the ISO since I was shooting the frames handheld – using the stabilised Nikon 16-35/4 helps but I wanted to ensure I was shooting at least 1/30th of a second to get reasonably sharp frames

Right on cue just before sunset the sky to the east (and eventually to the north and south as well) started showing me the sweet pastel tones I was hoping for so it was time to take a few sequences of pano frames as the light dipped

Starting the set a few minutes before sunset and finishing right on sunset

Stitched from eight (8) frames taken handheld at 16mm with a Hitech 0.9 Reverse GND

Sydney on High

The panorama at the top of the post started just moments after sunset and finished at 4:59 is my favourite – not just for the colour but also the placement of the various ships in the harbour and their water trails for the faster moving motor boats

and of course then the sky started getting really interesting when 5PM hit and I was asked to leave. I could easily have spent another 30 minutes there shooting twilight with the city lights on, the car trails from all the vehicles crossing the bridge and the sky lit for twilight above… Unfortunately unless someone knows someone who can arrange it this isn’t going to happen on any day of the year – even the best day the sun sets a mere 7 minutes before 5PM

We stayed at the luxurious Trump International Hotel whilst in Waikiki, staying again in a two bedroom apartment on the north west corner of the building on a high floor (26th)

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.

The apartment takes up the entire corner of the building so from the outdoors balcony of the building you get about a 270º view from the south east towards Diamond Head and around through the north east towards the city with the central mountain range behind it and across to the west and south west towards the ocean

Our apartment was spectacular with epic floor to ceiling panoramic views from the main living and dining area. One advantage of both the room location on this corner and also the building location relative to the Waikiki/Honolulu area was that:

– we could see both sunrise (over the city and mountains) and sunset (out to sea) from both inside the apartment but especially the view from the outer corner of the balcony where I could take 250º+ panoramas
– the building is located with a large parkland area to the western side of the building so we had a clear uninterrupted view out to the sand on the beach and the closest building on that whole side were quite a few blocks away allowing a nice clear view
– we were also high enough up in this building to see over the top of most of the other city buildings and thus had a great view of the receding city, the mountains behind and all the houses going up the fingers of land between the valleys going up the mountains

To give you and idea of the view here is a panorama I took from our balcony on the first evening there (7PM – just a few minutes after sunset) – ten (10) vertical frames taken with the 24-70 at 24mm with the Hitech 0.9 Reverse Grad and the Heliopan CPL

Waikiki Sunset

and a panorama taking inside the main living area looking out at our view just after sunrise

Trump Suite Sunrise

and two straight shots – the first looking essentially north and the second looking pretty much west

Room with a View A

Room with a View B

The main ground level entrance and lobby

Main Lobby

The Level 5 Lobby with some fireworks on the beach in the background

Lobby Fireworks

Huddling under some tiny trees on Stockton Dunes in the freezing cold with bitter winds and rain wasn’t a whole lot of fun…

The rain did however surprisingly clear after about half an hour and we decided to make a dash for that lone tree Gerry had seen

Once there we could see that it was placed nicely, sort of on the side of a large dune with lovely wind rippled sand sculpted around it and a nice shape to photograph

Note: These images (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.

Twilight light was dropping fast and we wanted to use some of it before we were left with totally black skies (we’d come here on an evening with no moon)

A lazy 200 second long exposure at f/5.6 with a touch of low light painting with Gerry’s uber torch from the side and a kiss on the tree and we have…

The Tree

We moved to the other side of the tree and started shooting up the dune toward the tree so we’d just have the sand dune and the sky behind it but we only had black skies to contend with now looking away from where the sun set over an hour ago. We continued trying various light painting combinations using both white and coloured light and even some steel wool spins behind the tree

What we started to notice however in our long exposures whilst light painting were trailing stars in the sky and wouldn’t you know it the skies were really clearing (it was still quite windy). It’s milky way shooting time!!!…

The Fire Bush

and this enabled us to start seriously trying some shots of the stars. It was really really bitter cold so we were no longer considering doing star trails (for which we’d need to hang around doing nothing for hours plus it would have been much better if we could have done a nice twilight shot beforehand for the foreground). We could however but do high ISO single static starfield images including the milky way so…

This final image is actually a composite of two (along with near zero photoshopping skill :))

– one 394 second long exposure shot at f/7.1 and ISO 100 – Suren lighting the dunes with low sculpted light from the far sides (most on the right and a touch of fill from the left), and a touch of white light on the tree, me with a red light torch shining up into the tree from below along with a burning steel wool spin behind courtesy of Gerry
– combined with a 31 second shot wide open at f/4 and ISO 6400 to capture the stars in an almost clear sky (just a few whisps of clouds left)

Each of the two individual shots actually look pretty good – however even the 394 second (over six minutes) long exposure shot had essentially a black sky with a few trailing stars – but together they just give you more of everything good 🙂

Heavens Watching

and another composite of a steel wool spin (171 sec @ f/8 and ISO 100) with the starry night (26 sec @ f/4 and ISO 6400)

Galactic Fire

We were getting really really cold so we started making our way back towards where we came into the dunes and stopped at a few interesting places on the way to try some light painting and steel woolage

Nothing else really worth posting from here (although watching Gerry struggle through the bushes to reach the top of a mound to do a what has to be said was a pretty epic horizontal steel wool spin was entertaining) – until we got back to this interesting clump of trees that we first saw much earlier on when we were just starting to get rained on – more in the next installment…

On our second day of touring the island by car we took the longer Island Circle Tour which takes us to the Dole Plantation in the middle of the island and up to the famous surfing beaches of the North Shore (Haleiwa), around to Laie with its Sea Arch and to the attractive island of Chinamans Hat before making our way back across the island on the Pali Highway again

Note: These images (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.

Once again we used the very useful IOS app – the GyPSy Guide – Oahu Full Island GPS Driving Tour to add assistance on the way

Just off the Kamehameha Highway and just past the town of Wahiawa we visited the Kukaniloko Birth Stones

Red Earth, Birth Stones

Next stop the Dole Plantation and time for the girls to explore the worlds largest maze. The maze stretches over three acres and includes nearly two and one-half miles of paths crafted from 14,000 colourful Hawaiian plants all crafted into the shape of a giant Pineapple

Pineapple Maze

In the Light

Then we headed up to the northern beaches and drove along the coast and stopped at a nice little spot where we could see turtles sunning themselves on the sand and frolicking on the waves breaking on the shore. These guys really do surf the waves…

To the locals this is just part of their normal day but to us it’s a special experience – one we almost never see – my girls loved every moment of it 🙂

Chillin’

Next stop the Pu’u o Mahuka Heiau State Monument which is the largest Heiau (Hawaiian temple) on the island – or at least what remains

Pu’u o Mahuka

A quick visit to the Laie Sea Arch

Laie Sea Arch

and then to the island (Mokoliʻi) also affectionately known as the Chinamans Hat for obvious reasons – just leaning in for a look

Chinamans Hat

and then as everyone was getting a little tired from a long day out we headed back home