Rodney Campbell’s Blog

Up early in the morning so it was another chance to setup my tripod at my bedroom window and take some shots facing approximately east towards morning twilight and sunrise. In my mind I felt there were probably way too many clouds in the sky however that’s nature and it’s way out of my control…

The other problem with lots of clouds and some breeze is that with the really long exposures the clouds move too much during the 30 second window which creates quite a bit of blur in the shots. This is why I’ve cropped the images to half height – basically the clouds above me in the sky especially in the wider angle shots have moved too much and it is just a blurry mess It isn’t till the much shorter exposures (sub second to a few seconds) that we actually get shots with decent sharpness.

Most of these shots are untouched from the out of camera RAW images (no white balance correction, no tone or colour correction) – I added a touch of contrast and brightness to two of the shots – just the standard Nikon RAW profile then resized and sharpened – so the colours you see are as the camera captured them.

The first shot is at 6:12AM – to the naked eye it is basically pretty dark outside and thus the long exposure and wide aperture to gather some light.

The second shot is 13 minutes later at 6:25AM – although this shot looks darker – it was taken at f/25 which is about 5 stops slower than the above image.

6:38AM – starting to get some nice colours rimming the clouds.

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6:59AM – a large cloudmass directly in front of the rising sun created this very nice “V” shaped shafts of orange light beaming up into the sky.

On Saturday mornings my three daughters have swimming lessons and then my eldest has a piano lesson. There is this quaint little church opposite where the lessons are held so in true sad case photographer style I decided to use the opportunity to take some shots and experiment a little. My middle daughter also received a little Canon point and shoot for Christmas so we all got to run around and snap some shots.

This was a chance to further try my new Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens both for portrait shots and some not so fantastic macro flower shots.

Macro photography really needs stability to work well – at this close range any infinitesimal movement is disaster because of a number of factors (including the fact that the area in focus can often be a millimetre deep so any movement will kill the shot). Some tips for good macro photography (pretty much most of which I ignored today!!):

• Must use a tripod!
• Keep the subject still (e.g. no wind)
• Use a remote shutter release or self timer (so that the act of firing the shutter doesn’t introduce vibration)
• At this range depth of field is tiny so a sufficient aperture (f/11, f/16, f/22 or above) is a ideal
• Focus manually (autofocus tends to hunt – a lot!)
• Soft light (overcast day)
• Don’t shoot down on flowers (shoot from the side or even from below)

In the case of today I had to shoot handheld because I didn’t have a tripod with me and we had lots of light breeze which was blowing these flowers all over the place – so I guess it’s lucky I got any macro shots that were even half usable – it was fun to play however…

The first two shots are with my Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. I then switched to the Tamron 90mm for the remainder of the shots.

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I think the next two shots are probably my favourites of the girls.

This shot shows how shallow the depth of field is at f/4.0 with this lens – I focused on the eyes of my eldest daughter and by the time we get across to my middle daughter who’s face is perhaps only two or three centimetres behind the focus is nicely thrown out.

The first of my macro (and not very at that) flower shots (with swaying flower heads in the breeze!!!!) and even at f/13 you can see how shallow the zone of focus is – just the back petals of the front flower along with the stem of the back flower are in focus.

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I just couldn’t capture a good shot of the lavender (too much swaying and slow shutter speed) but the colours were very nice so I thought I’d include it anyway

There were some spectacular frangipani’s in the grounds (and my daughters love these flowers) so we had to attempt a few shots of these as well.

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I wish I’d a bit more time to setup and take these shots a little better plus the midday sun was getting pretty harsh – but by now the girls had had about enough of me taking photos so they were pretty restless andt I just had to fire a few quick ones off.

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Time to try something a little different.

I setup my tripod at my bedroom window and took some shots facing approximately east away from the setting sun during sunset, twilight and dusk. All of these shots are untouched from the out of camera RAW images (no white balance correction, no tone or colour correction) – just the standard Nikon RAW profile then resized and sharpened – so the colours you see are as the camera captured them.

This first shot is at 7:24PM – there was still quite a bit of ambient light around as the sun had not yet set so even at an aperture of f/32 the shutter speed was still faster than one second.

The second shot is at 7:27PM – still ambient light around but the sun is falling below the horizon now.

The third shot is 7:42PM – the sun has well and truly set and now we have to use much longer shutter speeds to gather enough light.

The fourth shot is at 7:55PM – we are out to 30 second shutter speeds now at f/16. To the naked eye the sky was basically dark but the faint rays from twilight are providing those deep purpley blue hues in the sky. I’m having to manually focus now as there isn’t enough light to auto focus. I believe this is my favourite shot of the bunch.

The last shot is at 8:15PM and it’s well and truly black outside. There is no colour in the sky now just the lights from the city buildings. I had to go fully manual now – manual focus and full manual exposure.

I was fortunate to be able to borrow a colleagues Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC HSM Lens for an hour or two so that I could get a feel for what an Ultra-Wide lens would be like on my Nikon D90.

I went to Hyde Park (very close to my work in the city) during lunch and took a few shots.

This is inside the Anzac War Memorial looking up towards the ceiling at maximum wide (10mm).

Outside the memorial I took a sequence of approximately 50% overlapped shots (10 of them) with the camera vertically oriented so that I could stitch them together into a 360 degree panorama. I’ve locked the Aperture at f/11. Ideally I would have used a tripod (which I didn’t have at the time) so I’ve done this handheld – the result however is pretty good considering.