Rodney Campbell's Blog

Hamersley Gorge is in the north-west of Karijini, much further afield than the other gorges. It is quite a long dusty drive to get here and there’s really nothing else to visit anywhere in the area other than this gorge itself. However the spot is definitely worth the visit if you’re ever in the Karijini area. Swirls of rock sweep down through the gorge, and waterfalls rush into tranquil pools.

Cutting Through

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 66 mm, 1.6 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Hamersley is very different to the other gorges I’d visited in Karijini. Most of the gorges are more narrow slot canyon type, some as narrow as a metre wide down the bottom. In addition most have layers and lines in the rock which are more parallel and straight.

Hamersley Ripple

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 60 mm, 1/60 sec at f/9, ISO 640

Here at Hamersley the gorge is very wide and spread out and the earth has rippled and shifted so that the layers have undulated and curved as can be easily seen in this closer section here.

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.

Hamersley Drop

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 1.6 sec at f/16, ISO 50

There’s no denying the amazing beauty of this place that most people probably don’t even know exists.

Having spent an early morning exploring the wonders of Hancock Gorge I’d planned to head to Tom Price and then visit the very different but still wondrous in it’s own right Hamersley Range in the afternoon.

I returned back to the Karijini ECO retreat to pick up my parents and drove into Tom Price. Whilst I was taking photos in Hancock Gorge in the morning my daughter had joined our travelling partners for a mine tour and we’d be meeting them there for lunch.

Situated in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, Tom Price is a mining town located inland, at the edge of the Hamersley Range.

It’s about a one hour drive from the ECO Retreat to Tom Price and it was the first time we had any mobile coverage for three days, and the first actual town we’d been to in five days so it was unusual to be back in “civilisation”.

Hamersley

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 125 mm, 1/125 sec at f/16, ISO 450

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.

The town of Tom Price is an interesting Oasis in the middle of nowhere and not at all what I was expecting of a “mining town”.

After lunch my daughter and I left my parents with our travelling companions, re-fueled the vehicle and headed out on the long trip to Hamersley Gorge.

It’s an hours drive from Tom Price north to the gorge on mostly dirt road so the trip isn’t for the casual traveller.

Karijini National Park

Karijini National Park

The ideal time to shoot Hamersley Gorge and it’s famous Spa Pool is late afternoon out to sunset so with sunset today at 5:40PM we arrived around 3PM which was probably around ideal.

There was time for a quick pit stop at the facilities at the top of the hill which gave me time to take a few snaps from the top before we drove down to the car park below.

Hamersley Range

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 50 mm, 1/100 sec at f/9, ISO 100 x 13 Frames

This very wide stitched panorama consists of 13 horizontal frames taken handheld. It shows you the view of the Hamersley Range and the Gorge below that we were about to go down and visit.

Light Painting experiments with Gerry and my eldest daughter at Sculpture By The Sea late last year. We’d assumed that star trails were off the table with the weather gods summoning quite a bit of cloud about. Whispy clouds like we had are actually very good for long exposure light painting especially when there’s light pollution (from a large city like Sydney) about. It adds a nice lit streaky effect to what would otherwise be a pretty flat dark boring sky otherwise.

We’ve now moved to shoot from the traditional side of the sculpture in the primo spot at the point of Marks Park. We’re now on the outside looking in to the east out to sea. The advantage of shooting in this direction is you are facing out to sea where there’s far less light pollution (in the sky predominantly).

The Summoning

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 41 sec at f/2.8, ISO 640 x 39 Frames

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.

As luck would have it, it looked like we were also getting a bit of a break in the clouds so we figured we might give a short set of star trails frames a go. It was already 11:30PM and we weren’t keen to stick around much longer so we wacked out a few light painted foregrounds which we could potentially use to blend with the stacked trails later on if they worked.

I even dragged out my orb making tool – much to Gerry’s disgust (he stopped his frame before I spun my orb :)).

At 11:50PM we started our star trails sequence (41 sec at f/2.8 and ISO 640). Normally I’d like to use a much higher ISO (around 1000+) (to “see” more stars) and a longer shutter (60 sec) (to get longer trails per frame and have less overall frames to deal with). However we live in a big city and even looking out to sea we have to deal with a level of light pollution which makes star trails in or even near any populated area difficult. I guess we’re lucky to have been able to shoot for 40 seconds at ISO 640. I’ve attempted other trails where even 25 seconds at ISO 200 was overexposed.

So back to these trails – by the time we’d waited till a quarter past midnight we’d had enough. I only had 39 frames (about 25 minutes worth) so I wasn’t expecting much from this session.

The frames stacked pretty well though and even with a touch of cloud coverage still moving through the frames I was reasonably happy with the result. Plus we very nicely got the centre of the rotation of the stars right up in the top right corner – good planning you’d think but also with a touch of luck :).

Thanks also go to my friend Melinda for inspired assistance in titling The Summoning (and Techno-Tetris from the previous post).

The Twelve Apostles visitor facility and the viewing platforms for the Twelve Apostles is just a ten minute drive east of Port Campbell. I had to make a call here – I couldn’t shoot sunset at both the Twelve Apostles and the bottom of Gibson Steps – so I had to choose.

I’d never even been down Gibson Steps before and I expected I’d have more compositional freedom and choices down the bottom on the sand so I drove right past the Apostles car park and headed straight here.

Chasing the Sun

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 27 mm, 123 sec at f/11, ISO 50

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.

The Gibson Steps are an area of cliffs located just 1km (a 2 minute drive) east of the Twelve Apostles. The name Gibson Steps refers to the staircase leading down the high sheer cliffs to the stretch of beach at the bottom.

This allows you access to the beach level, where if you walk about 500m up the beach you can stand almost toe to toe against a couple of the limestone stacks that make up the Apostles. I’d read about and seen images from this location before so I was really keen to check it out for myself. I’d love to do a star trails session from down here one day – however not today – the very heavy clouds and the rising moon quashed that notion immediately.

I’d done my research beforehand and determined that the tides would remain lowish for a few hours after sunset. You definitely don’t want to end up being trapped by a rising tide. The southern ocean is not forgiving and you’re not likely to find much solace trying to scale the 50+m more than vertical cliffs which come straight down to the sand.

The sun was still quite bright at 8:30PM and was poking through gaps in the low cloud. I figured my only real option was to move along the beach so as to place the sun behind one of the stacks. The image above was taken like this with the Lee BigStopper to extend the exposure out to two minutes. Unfortunately this was pretty much the height of the sunset colour – it just got darker and bluer after this.

I chatted with a lovely German couple who were travelling all over Australia. They’d been sunbaking on the beach a little further along and were now on their way out as it was getting dark. They came over to see what I was doing and to chat. When I explained that I was taking multi minute long exposures they were keen to see the result.

Two of Twelve

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 27 mm, 323 sec at f/9, ISO 100

This was the first of two very long exposures. Awesome – basically it looked almost exactly like this straight on the back of camera. Up close with an apostle – so worth it…

We continued to chat till my second seven and a half minute exposure finished at 8:45PM before they headed off.