Rodney Campbell's Blog

I discovered this place during a little pre location research before heading to stay at Port Fairy. The Craggs is an amazingly rugged and wild section of Victoria’s coastline and it is just 12 kilometres west of Port Fairy.

A visit to The Crags will give you a good understanding of why this area is named The Shipwreck Coast, with menacing rock formations jutting from the seabed. The calcarenite cliffs, formed thousands of years ago as water “percolated” between shell fragments, fossils and sand.

The Lane

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm, 1/80 sec at f/11, ISO 160

We actually visited the spot briefly on our initial drive over from South Australia – just to do a quick recce and see if the area showed promise for a later visit. It did so I’m back now before sunset to have a lazy afternoon ‘scaping here.

It’s interesting coming here so late in the day – I didn’t leave till after dinner, arrived around 7:30PM and I’m still way early for sunset which won’t happen till around 9PM!.

The road coming into The Craggs is pretty cool so I spent a little time trying to get a good shot with the road leading off to infinity first.

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.

Primeval

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 247 sec at f/16, ISO 50

Then it was a quick walk out to the cliffs and I started looking for compositions. It was so very very windy and there were quite a lot of clouds. It was still daytime so I spent my time with the heavy ND filters (Lee BigStopper and LittleStopper) for a while for some long exposure love. The crazy jagged rock formations here are quite spectacular, it gives a really primeval look to the coastline.

The wind was so strong and gusty I had to do something to hold down the tripod.

Pro Tip: I’d previously purchased some dynamic bungee rope for this purpose which I keep in my camera bag. I made a loop of it and attached it to the hook at the bottom of my tripod head and put one foot in the loop near the ground with the rope stretching tightly inbetween. The rope is not static but a little stretchy so it applies a nice downwards force on the tripod driving those legs into the dirt and sand.

Still even with this added stability of the tripod I could see with each strong buffet of the wind the camera and lens vibrating as the gust of wind hits it. As a result sharpness will have suffered a little in some of my images from this evening.

Dreamscape

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 18 mm, 139 sec at f/11, ISO 100

The image above is actually a manual layer blend of three exposures. One short (2 sec) exposure without the Little Stopper stopped down a little for maximum depth of field and aiming to get a sharp foreground and rocky landscape without the vibrating camera movement. Then two long exposures with the Little Stopper which I used for all the sky and most of the smooth water.

This last image below was taken just moments before sunset with the Lee Little Stopper. The clouds were still reasonably heavy in the sky but I was hoping to get some good twilight colour. Here at the Craggs I wasn’t to be dissapointed…

On Alien Soil

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 185 sec at f/13, ISO 200

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