Rodney Campbell's Blog

Captured Entity

NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S @ 14 mm, 633 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Our third shot of the evening and we’re refining the lighting. (or throwing more kitchen sinks at it – you choose :)). Refinements include improvements in the way the inner orb is captured by the outer lines; Gerry’s red lighting of the plinth at the front; and of course his pixelstick for the surrounding fire; and lighting the orb stand with some EL veins; I also tested some “fairy dust”; Finally added some squared red lines around the inner orb with a tiny red LED. However we weren’t a fan and ditched that idea for follow up orbs

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images.

The Rift

NIKON Z 7 + 14.0 mm f/2.4 @ 14 mm, 629 sec at f/8, ISO 100 + 41 sec at f/8, ISO 800 x 70 Frames

This piece of epicness which I’ve titled “The Rift” was our last composition for the evening and probably my favourite of the night

Gerry had just one single shot of steel wool so we had to make it count. No pressure :). He’s doing the steel wool spin and using my 10 colour torch to light various things. I’m spending the whole of the 629 second exposure going nuts with the lime green EL wire lighting ALL the ground surfaces in the scene 🙂

Blend that with our 45 minutes of star trails (70 x 41 second exposures) and voila. Keen eyes might notice that I reprocessed the star trails from scratch for this shot. The trails are in reverse and falling down to earth in this image

Open Doorway

NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S @ 14 mm, 523 sec at f/8, ISO 100

The pride banner reigns supreme in this one. Gerry had to do a little tinkering with his pixelstick; to ensure we got a single continuous banner all the way around

Even then he was afraid it would go wrong and like a scared little … he had me stop his light painting frame and start a new one just for the banner in a separate frame (just in case :)). I had faith in his ability and left mine running to capture it all in one frame :). Ye of no faith…

So what happened in the 500 odd seconds before the banner at the end…

Well a lot of of my lime green EL wire like… everywhere 🙂

A little red light from the 10 colour torch at the front

The real difference however was Gerry doing that strange looking green dome. This was done using his green plastic cricket stump. He’d actually found this out at Boora point the weekend before. Attaching this to the pole he normally does the other domes with. Our first go at this was a bit crazy. He’d waved it around like he would for the normal domes (done with a point LED colour light). With what is essentially a light tube this didn’t work very well… it produced what could charitably be called a mess :). This second go produced a better and more interesting effect. Food for further thought…

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images.

Fortuitous

NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 20mm f/1.8 S @ 20 mm, 10 sec at f/1.8, ISO 2000 x 4 Frames

This is a vertical panorama stitch of four frames taken with the pretty awesome native Z 20mm f/1.8 lens. Shooting it wide open at f/1.8 lets in a lot of light. Still at wide open the stars are nicely pinpoint and without any serious aberrations even in the corners. It’s 11:50PM and the milky way core is nicely above the fort

We didn’t have pano rails with us for this session so we had to manually adjust the overlap by eye (in complete darkness!). I’d actually taken 8 frames from pointing somewhat downwards all the way up to slightly behind vertical. However for this final result I only use 4 of those frames

The actual pano stitch was a total PITA. It’s somewhat fortuitous I got anything out of them. Lightroom and Photoshop just plain refused to usefully stitch any combination of input frames. I ended up having to manually force an external pano stitching application

On the plus side the milky way was way more visible (even to the naked eye) this night; compared to our two previous astro sessions at Boora Point (Malabar) and Hornby Lighthouse (South Head)

Plasma Cannon

NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S @ 14 mm, 559 sec at f/8, ISO 100

A plasma cannon was our very first shot of our evening session at Middle Head Fort. It’s 9:30PM and a lazy 559 second exposure to start with. This was really just a tester and we’re just working our way into things. Turned out ok tho 🙂

We’re at one of the old wartime cannon emplacements. The circular area looked ideal for some orbs and domes so we obliged

Gerry on the voluminous blue EL wire in the foreground and my 10 colour torch in red mode on the walls. I’m having my first go at the new technique with the LED umbrella for the plasma orb (two colours – red and blue). It worked out well we thought. I was also trying the green auxiliary leds on my new Emisar D4V2 torch. If you look closely you can see some flashes of green in there in the middle. Alas the lines are not bright, solid or distinct enough. Thus the aux leds are not really viable for this light painting. Perhaps with much slower motion, pointed directly at camera at a higher exposure (say f/5.6 @ ISO 400) it might work when mixed with other weaker light sources

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images.