Rodney Campbell's Blog

Many many moons ago (well in February!) Gerry and I had another Sneaky Sunday session out at Cape Banks. This was a new location for us to explore down on the coast between New South Wales Golf Club and The Coast Golf Club & St. Michael’s Golf Clubs. Situated just a little south of Little Bay near the end of the peninsula of land at La Perouse.

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.

Gerry had found a potentially useful looking gully on Google Maps which appeared to have a good aspect for sunrise.

Clifftop Greenery

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 25 sec at f/22, ISO 100

So it was we found ourselves out on the cliffs just past 5AM looking for something good to shoot. Unfortunately for us the gully and the rocks below were uninspiring and after checking out the location as best we could in the dark we eventually gave it up as a lost cause and headed up to the top of the cliff to see if we could salvage the location from up top.

I was searching the clifftop for something interesting to include as some foreground interest in a shot. I don’t normally like to have just the top edge of the cliff as a line across the bottom of my frame or just empty water at the bottom so I’m usually on the lookout for something interesting to bring me into the bottom of the image. Here I’ve put myself really close to these very small clifftop plants with some cracks in the rock to lead me there. As I was so close I ended up shooting at f/22 to gain the depth of field I required to extend far enough forward to include my foreground greenery and also get the background to be somewhat sharp. Normally I don’t like shooting much past f/11 but in this instance I had to really stop down. I could (and probably should) have shot two images and focus stacked them for a better result. It’s 6:30AM and right on scheduled sunrise tho the thick cloud right on the horizon to the right has blocked that out. The shot above with the Heliopan CPL stacked with the Lee 0.9 Hard Grad.

6:40AM and it’s time to try the obligatory stitched panorama. I’ve got Gerry out there on the cliff edge on the left third shooting back towards me and to the cliff on my right where the sun which was now trying to peek through the low clouds was creating some interesting light and colour on the cliff face and plants over there.

This panorama a stitch of eight (8) frames of 3 seconds @ f/13 and ISO 100

Gerry’s View

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 3 sec at f/13, ISO 100 x 8 Frames

The sun finally made an appearance through a hole in the clouds so it was time to admire the view and take a selfie while I was at it.

This shot is actually a manually blended image using two frames – one a 0EV frame and the other a +2EV frame.

Cape Banks Rising

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 22 mm, 1/2 sec at f/16, ISO 100

Then it was out with the Lee BigStopper to try a long exposure looking over the cliff down to the rocks and water below and up the coast to the north. Here stacked with the Heliopan CPL and the Lee 0.9 Hard Grad.

Smooth Motions

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 312 sec at f/8, ISO 100

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