Rodney Campbell's Blog

It had literally been a month since I’d shot my last sunrise so I was itching to get out again. I joined a few friends including Deb, Gerry and Ron for this sunrise session at Whale Beach on Sydney’s far Northern Beaches (last year! :)).

It was yet again another near cloudless morning so we weren’t expecting any sky fireworks :). We’d arrived here fairly late – I normally like to be on location around an hour before sunrise but today that wasn’t going to happen. After the others arrived we headed towards the southern end of Whale Beach to the tidal pool there.

We did a bit of a recce of the pool and onto the rocks past the pool and checked out where the sun would rise on TPE. In the end I decided I liked the few rocks at the southern end of the beach just before the pool best so I headed back there.

Curves

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 30 sec at f/10, ISO 100

The image above was my first composition – in fact first shot of the morning. Right on 6AM it is only twenty minutes till sunrise.

This shot is a manual layer blend of three exposures on layers in Photoshop. The majority of the image is from a single shot however I’ve blended in a little from another exposure for some of the water swirl and from a third just for the light painted rock in the foreground.

Below we have a single exposure taken almost ten minutes later composing with this very interesting shaped mossy rock in the foreground in the sand. I’ve again light painted the foreground a little to bring it out of the darkness – it’s still more than ten minutes till sunrise.

Whale Tail

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 20.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Just before 6:30AM and the sun had already risen just to the right. I’ve setup on this small channel of rock to take my last shots of the morning. This is a manual blend of a couple of exposures as layers in photoshop. The base image for almost the whole frame and then I blended in some nice water movement in the channel at the bottom from another frame with better water structure there.

Pushing Through

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 1.30 sec at f/13, ISO 100

Don't forget to Share...

Google

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Pinterest

Email

Print