Rodney Campbell's Blog

Kath and Gerry joined me for another early morning – this time at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair on Sydney Harbour. It was a brisk 5:45AM start and we were left once again with cloud free skies.

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 slideshow gallery viewer.

We made the best of it as we could – we started to get some smattering of low cloud on the horizon and a tick over 10 minutes before sunrise we started having this crazy pink and blue banding in the sky like a fan or pin wheel coming out from where the sun was about to rise and a minute or so later it started happening in the opposite direction over the city – like huge pink searchlights pointing up into the sky. I don’t know exactly what causes this effect but it only lasted a few more minutes so it was a bit of a rush to put together a composition and include the cool sky and here we have (6:20AM with Lee 0.9 ND Grad + Heliopan CPL)…

FANtastic

NIKON D7000 + 12.0-24.0 mm f/4.0 @ 13 mm, 15 sec at f/16, ISO 100

Unfortunately the rest of the sunrise compositions aren’t worth anything…

After the sun rose we tried some panoramics of the city and harbour – I found 12-24 too short (at the long end) and the 70-200 far too long (even at the 70 end) so I settled on my 17-50. This was stitched from 17 vertical captures with approx 50% overlap shot at 45mm at 1/10 sec @ f/11 (although I cropped out the last 4 or 5 frames worth on the right).

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-50.0 mm f/2.8 @ 45 mm, 1/10 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Lastly I switched back to the UWA and borrowed Kaths new Lee BigStopper to give it a run (thanks Kath :)). This one looked good even on the back of the camera (even with and possibly because of the natural vignette) and not a lot was required in post to produce this 160 second long exposure (7:18AM with the whole kitchen sink – 12mm + Lee BigStopper + Lee 0.9 ND Grad + Heliopan CPL)

Harbour Blue

NIKON D7000 + 12.0-24.0 mm f/4.0 @ 12 mm, 161 sec at f/11, ISO 100

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