Rodney Campbell's Blog

Right in the heart of Sydney’s CBD lies a fantastic late nineteenth-century building called the Queen Victoria Building (or QVB). The Romanesque Revival building was constructed between 1893 and 1898 and covers an entire city block. Designed as a shopping centre, it was later used for a variety of other purposes until its restoration and return to its original use in the late twentieth century

The architecture and detail in this up market shopping centre is fantastic with a blend of old and a little new. I’ve shot here on a number of occasions but the last real series was a couple of years ago. So inspired by a shot recently posted by fellow Aussie photographer Mykal Hall taken inside the QVB – I set out limited to one lens, one focal length for one hour, on a nice overcast day to see what I could create

Note: These photographs (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.

Running the Curve

NIKON D600 + 15.0 mm f/2.8 @ 15 mm, 1/15 sec at f/4, ISO 560

I decided to just shoot handheld with my fabulous Sigma 15mm fisheye lens (the security at the QVB are a little hot and cold about tripods and monopods so I decided not to risk it and forgo the support this time). The Sigma fisheye allows me to shoot at f/2.8 and being so wide I figured I could get a fairly decent depth of field even wide open so I was hoping I wouldn’t need to shoot at too high an ISO for some decent shots.

The QVB is busy pretty much all the time and one of the downsides of using such a wide lens is that it gets absolutely everything in the frame (with a 180 degree field of view) – as such waiting for a moment with no, few or just the right people is an exercise in extreme patience :). In fact there were a few compositions where I’d waited for ages but eventually gave up because I could never get the view that I wanted.

I shot brackets of three images generally three stops apart (the D600 allows +-3EV steps in bracketing) and usually off a base of -1EV to retain as much detail in the highlights as I could for later processing (-4EV, -1EV, 2EV)

Once I started processing the HDR brackets I tried a few combinations but what I liked the most was a series of similarly toned and processed monochrome images

Up and Down

NIKON D600 + 15.0 mm f/2.8 @ 15 mm, 1/40 sec at f/2.8, ISO 100

J

NIKON D600 + 15.0 mm f/2.8 @ 15 mm, 1/25 sec at f/2.8, ISO 100

Criss Cross

NIKON D600 + 15.0 mm f/2.8 @ 15 mm, 1/30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 100

Inner Pill

NIKON D600 + 15.0 mm f/2.8 @ 15 mm, 1/50 sec at f/2.8, ISO 100

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