Rodney Campbell's Blog

Urgh… we’d just had perhaps 3 hours sleep after spending all day and night shooting and freezing… It was a road trip after all so at 5AM we’re awake to do it all again…

We were heading to Zenith beach near Nelson Bay. Upon arrival the location was awesome – primeval rocks along the coast and these fantastic pointed mountains just reaching up out of the bay. Unfortunately the cloud scenario was much less impressive – just a few tiny specks – it was going to be one of those days…

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.

This place is a definite for a return trip someday – so many interesting structures and compositions – all we needed was some epic clouds and colour to match

We did get some pastel goodness which allowed me to put together a few images I was happy with

Sun at the Zenith

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 24 mm, 62.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

First up this stitched panorama from seven (7) vertical frames with the trusty 16-35 f4 – I actually had to go back and redo a bunch of the frames as I went along since the area where the sun was going to come up was so ridiculously bright. This required a bit of massaging in post to get it to work for me but I do like the composition and it pretty much covers a 180º field of view looking both up and down the coast from where I setup out on the rocks

Actually if you zoom in real tight – way out on the right that little silhouette on the rocks is Suren sitting behind his tripod

Here’s a vertical composition from the same spot with the 3 stop Lee Grad stacked with the 3 stop Hitech Reverse Grad just to hold down the massively bright sky and the sun hasn’t even risen yet! – still more than 15 minutes till sunrise

Zenith Pointer

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 8.50 sec at f/11, ISO 100

and that was pretty much the end of the nice colour – after that we were left with just a yellow stain on the horizon (Gerry has a much less favourable term for this – think of a regular bodily function :))

I did setup in this nice channel looking straight out towards sunrise over these very cool jagged looking rocks out in the water

Streaks and Leaks

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 1/2 sec at f/11, ISO 200

after that the sun rose and all the water spray droplets on my filters turned to sparkly mess. I tried a littlestopper and then a bigstopper long exposure but then gave up in vain but I can still heartily recommend a trip to Zenith beach

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