Rodney Campbell's Blog

Gerry invited me to a sunset session at The Gap at Watsons Bay

The Gap is an ocean cliff on the South Head peninsula in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. The area faces the Tasman Sea and is in the suburb of Watsons Bay. It’s an extremely popular destination for visitors as you can get all round views of both the ocean, the heads as well as the harbour and the city. Unfortunately it has also gained infamy for a few suicides

I met Gerry there and we rece’d the area but basically found nothing suitable – at least not with the conditions we had. Undeterred we headed to nearby Camp Cove which was a mere two minutes drive away

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.

Camp Cove is a popular spot for photographers – great for sunsets as it faces west into the harbour and towards the Sydney CBD (to the south west). Finally and most importantly it has this fantastic little lifeboat shed out in the water at the northern end of the beach which makes for great foreground interest

Setup for some classic compositions on the rocks near the shed and started things off with this four (vertical) frame stitched panorama with the sun on the right of frame just setting in the west (5:10PM) and the Sydney CBD just to the right of the shed to the south on the left of frame

Lining the Cove

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 1/2 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Keeping the vertical orientation I added the Lee LittleStopper (a 6 stop ND filter) for a long exposure with the clouds moving nicely in the sky. With this frame I’m also light painting that tiny little pool of water filled with nice green weed in the foreground (with a small LED torch)

Cove to City

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 60 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Moved up and back to shoot more down towards the shed and take in the larger scene with a horizontal compo – again with the LittleStopper – tho it was getting darker quickly by this stage (5:30PM and twenty minutes after sunset) but we were getting some fantastic twilight colour

Campers Pointing the Way

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 173.00 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Finally just before we left I switched to the longest lens I had with me at the time – the 24-70 and racked out to 70mm for a closer view of the Sydney CBD skyline from the side (normally I’m shooting the CBD from the northern or western sides – here we’re getting the view from the south eastern side)

Skyline

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm, 6.30 sec at f/8, ISO 100

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