Rodney Campbell's Blog

I joined good friend Gerry for yet another Sydney star trails attempt – we’re perfecting our ability to shoot good star trails in a light polluted city environment.

We’d decided this time to try Waverley Cemetery which has absolutely epic views over the ocean – but more on that in the next post 🙂

As we’d arrived early (late afternoon, before sunset) to rece the cemetery to look for some good candidates for later light painting and star trails we figured we’d head out to somewhere nearby on the coast to shoot sunset.

Fishing for Luck

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 44 mm, 93 sec at f/11, ISO 100

So here we are at nearby Clovelly and as is usually the case anywhere along our rocky shores at the start and end of each day we have people fishing. More often than not we see some crazy rock fisherpeople right out on the rocks getting washed over by the incoming waves – apparently the fishing is good in the churn. I’m not so sure they’d enjoy it as much once they’re swept into the chasm.

As is my usual bent I oped for some long exposures but I still wanted my fishing people to still be there. They’re not going to stay perfectly still for my one to two minute frames (I know – completely unreasonable right!) so I take some long exposure images (with the Lee LittleStopper in this case) and also take some much shorter ones without and blend in post.

In this case I’ve found a couple 1 to 2 second exposures I can use for the individual people fishing and I’ve blended them into the 93 second long exposure for the final result.

Full disclosure – none of the fishermen were harmed in the production of this image and they caught some pretty large and nice looking fish whilst we were there.

Moving on the sun was setting rapidly in the west behind us and we actually got some nice colour in the sky that way (which I couldn’t end up using even though I chased it around the corner to try).

I did find there really interesting rippled rocks and once the sun had set and we were into twilight I did some non little or big stoppered long exposures just using a light grad and the polariser. This one a two minute job at ISO 200 juxtaposing the very rippled ricks against the very non rippled water.

Ripples

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 124 sec at f/11, ISO 200

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