Rodney Campbell's Blog

Having shot sunrise at Coogee beach earlier this day, we were actually planning a night time star trails session at this location at Bondi Golf Course. During the pre-planning for the shoot (checking out Google Maps and street view on our phones) we spied this nice looking windswept lone tree on the grassy fairways and figured we could kill two birds with one stone.

We were already hoping for completely cloudless skies for the star trails so if everything fell into place I figured we’d likely get a nice pastel coloured sunset (looking away from the sun) which would be ideal for shooting this tree.

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.

I arrived early and did a little rece of the area before Gerry arrived and once he was there we started our session with the tree.

I took a number of bracketed panorama source frames – looking to create a sweeping panorama with the lone tree in a sea of negative space. I shot them with the 24-70 close to the 70mm end and I’ve yet to process those images, however in Lightroom I particularly liked the feeling of this wider single frame – it’s a single exposure cropped to pano format

The Lone Tree

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 5 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Here is another panormama – this time a stitched version from six (6) frames taken at 35mm – which shows a wider perspective on the location. It covers almost 180˚ with the sun having set on the far right and the ventilation stack we’d be using as our midground interest for our star trails later towards the left.

It’s around 6:15PM and about 20 minutes after sunset

Stacking the Pastels

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 35 mm, 6 sec at f/8, ISO 200

The following was taken from the clifftop looking down to the rocks and ocean below pretty much directly behind the vent stack. It’s 6:40PM and 45 minutes after sunset and we’re pretty much at the end of twilight. I had to open the aperture to f/8 and bump the ISO to 800 for this natural (except for the 0.9 grad over the sky) extreme long exposure (262 seconds – almost four and a half minutes – and it was still way underexposed). Gerry kindly provided some selective light painting of the rocks and white water wash below with his uber torch

Bondi Dilema

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 17 mm, 262 sec at f/8, ISO 800

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