Rodney Campbell's Blog

By this time some other families had arrived to watch the sunset from Remarkable Rocks. As they were wandering around taking their own photos of themselves with the rocks I setup in the middle to take a few stitched panoramas whilst the sun sank down towards the horizon.

This one is a full 360 degree panorama comprised of 14 frames taken at 24mm. Unfortunately the frames towards the setting sun lost all detail around the sun but this was the best I could recover from the original non bracketed RAW images. Still pretty amazing dynamic range from the D600 sensor in dealing with the massively wide variances in brightness looking at the sun through to near darkness in the shadows.

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.

360 Degrees

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 1/8 sec at f/11, ISO 100

I then got a little tighter at 26mm and took twenty one sets of three bracketed frames (-1EV, -3EV and +1EV) (so 63 images in total) for another 360 degree pano right on sunset.

In the end however I decided to just use the -1EV frames and stitched just a smaller selection of them for this view which encompasses probably around a 180 degree field of view.

Sunset Remarks

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 26 mm, 1/3 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Before sunset I was primarily looking at shooting the landward side and the side being lit by the sunset. Now that it was after sunset I looked to move around the whole area, exploring the rocks from other angles and seeing how I might come back and do further compositions on another day.

I particularly liked this view looking from down the slope on the seaward side looking back up these amazing water worn grooves in the base granite towards the windworn rocks up on top.

These grooves were particularly interesting because on the tops of the ridges the crazy orange lichen grew and coloured the surface of the rock but down in the depression of the grooves where presumably the water ran the lichen couldn’t grow and left you seeing the bare rock beneath.

This shot a 400 second long exposure with just the Lee LittleStopper twenty five minutes after sunset.

Chomp

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 401.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Finally… reluctantly… it was time to leave. Walking back up the boardwalk away from the rocks… time for one more shot looking back at these truly remarkable rocks…

Animals in the Dark

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 35 mm, 23 sec at f/11, ISO 100

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