Rodney Campbell's Blog

It’s a bit of a mindbender being out at the Glen Davis Oil Shale Refinery ruins at night. It’s a pretty spooky location with all of these abandoned buildings and the skeletal remains of buildings…

Mindbender

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 6400 x 6 Frames

Entropy * Photographic Exhibition

One concept; 9 Photographers; 9 Interpretations

Update:

Less than 6 weeks to go!

For my exhibition pieces I’d originally planned to have them mounted on black core Gatorboard. To check I had one test image professionally mounted. However I and many of the rest of my group decided the look just wasn’t quite right. There were a number of practical benefits for this system but in the end I believe traditional matting and framing will suit my images better.

I’ve now visited the framers and worked out what custom frames I’ll use and have ordered them all.

Details:

Our exhibition will be at The Art Space on the Concourse @ Chatswood (Sydney’s North Shore). It’s showing from Wednesday 7th to Sunday 18th September 2016 and entry is Free. If you can make it we’d love to see you there.

If you’d like to visit when I’m definitely going to be there. I’m currently there on Sunday the 11th and Saturday the 17th.

What’s Next?:

We’ve also purchased the mat boards and once the frames arrive, we will be laboriously cutting all the large mats for our images.

Mindbender

This large old building in particular is pretty special. The remains of the walls and window frames are still mostly intact, but the entire roof is open to the skies. For a night astro shooter like me this is a fantastic opportunity.

Unfortunately the Milky Way wasn’t in the right direction for the type of shot I wanted. There was one building I really wanted to use for the shot I had in my mind. It was perfect except it had this massive tree growing in the middle :(. This would have been cool if only the Milky Way was running through the sky in the right direction. Or I could get up to the second story to shoot from a higher position (without dying :)).

Still the Milky Way streaked through part of the gap in the roof overhead so I crafted a composition as best I could and went for it.

The Panorama:

This mindbender construction is a stitched panorama of six (6) overlapping horizontal frames with the Samyang 14mm. The craziness is that I’ve pointed myself towards the internal corner of the building and taken a set of frames in a vertical stripe. The end result is commonly known as a vertorama. The frame leads in at the bottom, pointing straight down in front of me, up the walls of the building and through the roof and eventually over my head to the floor behind me.

The opening in the roof above lets you see through to the amazingly clear night sky above.

For this set of shots I was using my new Novoflex Panorama System which I wrote about in an earlier post.

This made it incredibly easy to take the frames. What can I say except to say that this thing is amazing. I’ve shot a number of painstaking manually adjusted milky way panorama’s in my time.

Taking source panorama frames manually is a slow, painful and laborious process, fraught with the possibility of stitching failure. Basically in the dark at night you cannot see what you’re composing or how far you’re rotating. It is thus very hard to ensure you’re getting a roughly 50% overlap. It’s also just about impossible to have nicely parallel frames.

Using this Novoflex panorama system made things effortless. The camera can be rotated horizontally and vertically around the nodal point and the click stops make it trivial and error free in the dark :).

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