Doing Time at Long Bay... - Rodney Campbell's Blog Rodney Campbell's Blog

Doing Time at Long Bay…

by Rodney Campbell on Apr.12, 2015, under Life, Photography

Back to the eastern suburbs of Sydney earlier this year for another Sneaky Sunday with Gerry. This time just behind the Long Bay Correctional Facility (yes prisoners doing time in high security) and right next to the Randwick Golf Course we find Long Bay.

We met in the carpark over an hour before sunrise as we usually try to do before a sunrise shoot. By the time we’d recce’d all of the coastline along the golf course on the southern arm of long bay we finally came back to this spot on the rocks to try our luck. By this time it was now just 20 minutes till sunrise.

Misty Ruffles

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 41 sec at f/11, ISO 100

The cloud cover was very heavy this morning but the clouds had this nice rippled texture which we were hoping much light up a little at some stage during the morning.

Whilst there was no epic sunrise or epic colour this morning it was actually a lovely morning to be out, the conditions were well suited to some moody compositions and I was pretty pleased with just about every frame I’d shot this morning – pretty much the entire shoot needed very little done in post and they almost all looked good straight out of camera.

One of the things I’d planned to do this morning were some example images to explain a topic to my Arcanum mastery cohort. I’d intended to do a session on the practical use of polarisers in landscape (or in this case seascape) photography. So whilst I was out there I shot some test frames to highlight in my discussions. I’ll save these frames for now and do a follow up tutorial post on the topic.

Just before 6AM the image above is the second frame of the morning, the first shot was basically the same it’s just that I like the water motion in this one a little better.

Technically this shot below is 15 minutes after sunrise but heavy cloud has all but obscured it’s effects. I’ve found some nice potholes in the rocks and some reflective pools of water. This final image is a manual layer blend of two frames – one shot for the main scene and another overexposed by about a stop just so I could get a little more detail inside those potholes in the rock. I’m pretty sure I could have easily extracted that detail out of the original raw file of the first shot but as I had both available to me and I’ve been practicing a little with using photoshop and masking lately, I figured I’d give it a quick go.

In the Hole

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 10 sec at f/16, ISO 100

The wind worn rocks here are very nice – with the amazing curved lines everywhere and different coloured sandstone intermixed across the surface. A wonderland of lines and texture and a little colour. The following two shots are two nearby compositions where I’ve spent time framing my shots to make best use of the pieces available to me.

Wave Motion