Rodney Campbell's Blog

This spot is literally metres from he caravan on Lily Creek Lagoon. I was too tired to go out so I figured attempting a little relaxing set of star trails right at my door would have to do.

The lake is filled with many ghostly dead trees. With their white and grey twisting trunks and branches reaching up out of the water, the result of the diversion dam of the nearby Ord river creating this man made lake.

Ghosts

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 4000

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.

I would have liked to have shot from right at the waters edge or even out in the water, with the nice bare trees in the foreground and the stars reflecting in the water.

However the dead trees were quite a long way out and the water nearest the shore was covered in dead water Lily leaves… Well that and the fact that these waters were crocodile infested might have had something to do with it! :). Figuring being made a ghost myself might not be the best idea I opted instead to include this most fortunate and fabulous ghost gum large in my foreground.

This is basically in the town area of Kununurra so I was a little unsure I’d be able to shoot this so cleanly. Still these darks skies are very good (even with a little bit of moon out and little bit of town light pollution). In the end I was able to shoot this at up to ISO 4000 (it wasn’t dark enough to go to ISO 6400).

Lily Creek Lagoon

With that in the can I setup for star trails and set the sequence going – 61 second exposures at f/2.8 and ISO 1250.

Frankly I’m pretty surprised they worked. During the trails sequence I had a number of people walking through the frame with torches along the lakeshore searching for crocodiles. Thankfully it looked like no one shone their torch directly into the camera and I was able to just darken the bottom of those frames I needed.

I’m saving this final image for an exhibition I’ll be doing with the Parallaxis group next year so the teaser above will have to do till then sorry :)…

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