Sunrise over the Torrens... - Rodney Campbell's Blog Rodney Campbell's Blog

Sunrise over the Torrens…

by Rodney Campbell on Feb.01, 2015, under Life, Photography

Woke early for a sunrise session in the parklands looking over the Torrens river looking back towards the city.

In theory the sun was supposed to rise (looking from this position) behind the Adelaide Festival Centre (that white building on the left). However I took these twelve long exposure frames over the sunrise boundary and as you can see – nada… The sky just got gradually brighter.

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.

Still the black swans seemed to enjoy my company and it did make for a nice blue hour panorama with nice smoothed glassy water from the long exposures. Because it was getting much brighter during the time I started the sequence till I finished I had to adjust the exposure times across the frames.

Adelaide Blues

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm, 123 to 31 sec at f/11, ISO 100 x 11 Frames

Pro Tip: When photographing frames for a stitched panorama at the edges of the day (sunrise or sunset): 1) At sunrise take the frames pointing towards the currently brightest parts of the frame at the start (towards where the sun will rise and only get brighter) and finish where it was currently darkest (but will brighten over time – away from sunrise). 2) At sunset do the reverse – start pointing away from the sun and finish towards the now set sun. The aim here is to reduce the overall exposure differential as you’re rotating to take the frames.

In the case here I started on the left and rotated around to the right. Even using this technique and because I started at 6:07AM and finished at 6:26AM I still had to manually adjust the exposures across the frames. I started with a 123 second exposure (@ f/10) for the first frame and ended with a 31 second exposure (@ f/11) for the last frame.

and for kicks (and because I noticed the left and right sides would likely reasonably match up) here is the Panosphere (Tiny Planet) version…

Torrential

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm, 31.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

On my early morning walk to this spot I’d also scoped out another potential shooting location. The view off the Montefiore Bridge – which crosses the Torrens – looking westwards (away from sunrise) over the train tracks which come into Adelaide’s Central Railway station.

Having finished the “sunrise” session and with the skies still pretty grey and overcast I headed back to the bridge to see if a long exposure would salvage the view.

This end result is actually the result of manually blending four long exposure frames taken with the Lee Bigstopper (ranging from 30 to 216 seconds).

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