Rodney Campbell's Blog

I’d been meaning to try something like these images for a while now. I had really wanted to do them around twilight so there would also be colour in the sky and now that I’ve done these images I’d possibly also choose a faster shutter so that perhaps the bridge might be slightly recognisable in the image?

I was in the city with my tripod shooting the 1440 challenge so as I was going to drive home (around 8PM) over the Sydney Harbour Bridge I decided to give this a try…

Anyway the technique for the following is:
– attach the ultra wide angle lens to the camera
– setup the tripod inside the car so that the top is poking through the sunroof and thus the camera is outside the car pointing forward over the bonnet (I know scary… :))
– attach the remote trigger to the camera so it can easily be triggered by hand inside the car
– set an aperture for good depth of field (I chose f/16) – although at 8mm this isn’t really very necessary – but I was also making sure I’d get a reasonably long shutter speed (I wasn’t sure just how bright the lights would be)
– focus at something about 5m away and then lock the focus to manual (I didn’t want the camera to try and auto focus each time I take a shot)
– start driving normally (although I did consciously try to drive smoothly and a little slower) and just press the remote trigger to take the shots at “appropriate” times

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay gallery viewer.

This first is whilst driving along the Western Distributor before the bridge – I liked what happened to the tall glassy office building on the right

Speed

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 8 sec at f/16, ISO 100

The second is whilst on the deck of the Sydney Harbour bridge

Ribbons of Light

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 13 sec at f/16, ISO 100

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