Rodney Campbell's Blog

I’m doing a little project for a friend which involves creating a panorama of a scene down at Balmoral here in Sydney.

Here in Sydney we’ve been having glorious sunrise skies here of late – each morning I’d look out my bedroom and bathroom windows and see this fabulous sky out east and wish I was out there shooting. Monday and Tuesday had very nice skies so I figured I’d try my luck on Wednesday morning and head out early and see what transpires. The sun is rising later at this time of year but it still requires a 5AM start to get there early enough – I arrived before 6AM, about 50 minutes before the 6:40AM sunrise.

This first pano was taken at 6AM and is the result of stitching 8 frames taken at 29mm (with the trusty Nikon 16-35/4) with exposure times ranging from 120 seconds down to 40 seconds @ f/9 at ISO 200 (I bumped the ISO so the exposure times wouldn’t be too ridiculous). I actually took most of the pano sets going in reverse from right to left (I normally tend to shoot panos from left to right). I did this because it might take quite a few minutes to finish the whole set and as the sun is rising all the time and the sky/ambient is getting brighter as I’m going through the set I wanted to start with the brightest part of the scene first and work my way around to the darkest (which would brighten up a bit more by the time I got around there :))

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.

Even with it being 40 minutes before sunrise you can see there’s quite a bit of colour in the sky and the long exposures have helped here

Balmoral Evening

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 29 mm, 43 sec at f/9, ISO 200

This second pano was taken just before sunrise at 6:32AM and is the result of stitching 9 frames taken at 20mm with exposure times of 2 or 3 seconds @ f/13 at ISO 100. I’d actually taken 12 frames for this set for a full 360 degree panorama but I didn’t stitch that (yet)

Burning Sunrise over Balmoral

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 3 sec at f/13, ISO 100

Don't forget to Share...

Google

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Pinterest

Email

Print