Rodney Campbell's Blog

I’d just arranged to meet my friend Gerry in Martin Place at 6PM to go shoot pre Vivid activities and I was looking out the windows of my office building and the sky was looking very promising for a great sunset (there had been burning off out west earlier that morning so the particle level in the atmosphere was looking bad for the environment and general health but great for photography). It was just over 45 minutes to sunset (5PM) so I headed out of the office and down to the car park to pick up my push bike and made a dash through the city for Mrs Macquaries Chair (I figured I’d try shooting sunset back towards the Opera House and Bridge)

Pink Blush

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 18 mm, 4 to 42 sec at f/11, ISO 50

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.
As it happens I didn’t make it – it was almost sunset when I was riding past the Art Gallery of NSW. I figured I wasn’t going to make it but as I road over the bridge where Art Gallery Road crosses the Cahill Expressway I looked to the left and saw the sky aglow behind the city skyscraper skyline

A hasty stop and I setup above the road with the idea of catching a great sunrise with the lit city buildings in the background and light trails from the cars below

Art Gallery Road is a good spot for this since it faces slightly North West pretty much towards sunset (behind all those tall buildings) and there are lots of lanes of traffic below which boded well for plentiful trails. Also helping was that it was now peak hour traffic time so there were tons of cars on the road – perfect

Now unfortunately I hadn’t brought any of my filters (except a screw in polariser) because I was only expecting to be taking night time photos at Vivid this day – so I was forced to bracket images that I could blend later in post. The sky behind the buildings was pretty bright compared to the darkness of the foreground below and this side of the buildings – I could still get everything in one shot but the foreground was very dark

I wanted as long an exposure as possible (so I could get trailing lights from the moving cars) so I shifted the ISO down to 50, stopped down to f/11 and put the polariser on to cut another two stops of light – this let me get a normal exposure of 11 seconds and a 42 second long over exposure for more foreground trails and a brighter foreground. The image at the top of the post is a result of blending these two plus a shorter 4 second exposure to pull back the sky

The end of the pink and a few more trails – this is the result of blending five (5) manually taken bulb mode exposures from 5 to 82 seconds long

Last Pink

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 17 mm, 5 to 82 sec at f/13, ISO 50

after that I was getting more car light trails but less colour in the sky. Technically I could blend shots from different times – so an early sky plus the later foreground (which I may try) since I was shooting all these later shots on a tripod with the same framing

Finally twenty minutes after sunset I’m getting a nice balance between lots of trails and the lights on the streets and city buildings lighting up – lost most of the colour in the sky now so it’s turning that cool twilight blue – four exposures from 5 to 41 seconds blended

Life in the Fast Lane

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 17 mm, 5 to 41 sec at f/11, ISO 100

It wasn’t till about 25 minutes after sunset before the sky and foreground evened out enough to where I could get really nice single exposures and by then the colour in the sky was long gone and I was left with a very nice twilight blue

Twilight Trails

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 17 mm, 5 to 41 sec at f/11, ISO 100

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