Rodney Campbell's Blog

Day two of music tour and we’re up early for a busy day ahead. Today we’d be criss crossing town travelling to some local schools to play some concerts.

Avenue of Trees

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm, 1/160 sec at f/5.6, ISO 500

Travelling to and from town (Bathurst) I’d seen this fabulous section of the road with this avenue of trees that I thought might make a good image. Traveling on a double decker bus with all the children it wasn’t really possible to just stop for me to take a photo so… it was improvisation time. I headed upstairs in the bus and pushing the shutter I shot this through the front window as we travelled on the road back into town in the afternoon. We were on our way to the bowling alley for the kids to let off some steam :).

As it was shot from a moving vehicle I was pretty happy with the final result – it’s obviously not super sharp zoomed to 100% but I got roughly the composition I wanted.

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.

Of course the kids had a ball at ten pin bowling – having the entire place and all the lanes to ourselves with the retro disco lighting and music was pretty damn fun :).

Bowling

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 56 mm, 1/60 sec at f/5.6, ISO 4000

I headed out a little earlier this evening to continue looking for the starry skies. Again the clouds were fairly minimal with just a few streaks right on the horizon. I got out just after 8:30PM and decided to just do a star trails set from around the same spot I’d shot the previous evening. Having quickly looked at the previous evenings result I decided a horizontal framing would work better.

I tested a couple compositions and settled on this one. I took a couple frames with light painted foregrounds (again to blend in with the trails in the final image). Here is a 30 second shot at ISO 6400 with some gentle lightpainting.

Crossing Paths

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 6400

Pro Tip: Light painting the foreground when shooting at High ISO’s (like 6400) you need to use a very low power setting on your torch. My headlamp torch has an extremely bright High mode (1020 Lumens) which is very useful for lighting things very very far away and for lighting massive areas when shooting at Low ISO’s (e.g. 100). You cannot use this more for light painting when shooting at High ISO’s (the image will overexpose to white in moments). My headlamp also has a Low mode (3.5 Lumens) which is down near moonlight mode which is ideal for lighting the foreground when shooting at High ISO’s.

I started my star trail sequence at 8:47PM and went back to the cabin to do some other things. At 11:22PM I returned and packed up with 152 x 61 second frames in the can.

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