Rodney Campbell's Blog

I joined fellow Sydney photographer Jason Baker and a visiting friend from Melbourne Lachlan Downing for an impromptu sunrise session at Long Reef on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

This location is usually a photographers delight with a very large reef area surrounding the point of land jutting out into the ocean. There’s usually something to shoot here no matter the tide. Strewn across the large shallow reef area are hundreds, perhaps thousands of interesting rocks of varied shapes and sizes.

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.

Two

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 68 sec at f/11, ISO 100

This image was taken just before 5:25AM (25 minutes before sunrise). I’ve switched to my favoured vertical composition and swivelled around the same two rocks but this time facing more to the east and towards where the sun will rise in 25 minutes. I’ve light painted my foreground rocks with some selective low zoomed torch but stronger this time to really pop those rocks from their surrounds.

The image below was the first of the morning session and taken just five minutes before the previous image. It gives you a good idea of what the reef looks like with a low to mid rising tide. Here we are looking south east with the sun over the horizon to the left and I’ve used a touch of low light painting on my chosen foreground rocks.

Crackled Perspectives

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 109 sec at f/11, ISO 100

This is one of those times where the slight colour cast when stacking the Format Hitech Reverse Grad with the Lee Grad works to my favour.

As it approaches sunrise it gets much brighter quite quickly and we loose the natural long exposures. I’ve found myself a new rock – one in a larger but very shallow still pool of water

Boulder on Ice

NIKON D600 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 10.00 sec at f/11, ISO 100

As I was already setup for a vertical composition I then decided to put together some frames for a stitched panorama.

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