Rodney Campbell's Blog

With torrential rain for what seemed like weeks here in Sydney we finally received some clear weather. However with the weather as fickle as it can be we go from one extreme to the other. Days and days of 100% overcast skies and rain like we’re planning to use Noahs Ark and then just like that it’s cloudless clear skies.

The cloudless skies aren’t so fantastic for sunrise or sunset photography either. However clear skies are good for some star trail action…

So with a couple days of crystal clear skies I figured it was time to get out and do some shooting. It was late notice but on Saturday I invited a couple of friends to join me for a Star Trails and Lightpainting session at Middle Head Fort that night.

White Lighters

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 22 mm, 162 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

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.

Built in response to a feared French invasion. The battery on Middle Head was built in 1871 and the fort was built on a strategic location and received many additions until 1911. It formed part of a network of ‘outer harbour’ defences. They were designed to fire at enemy ships as they attempted entry through the Sydney Heads.

One of the main problems when shooting star trails is what to do whilst you are waiting the many hours for all those shots to complete. Using a programmed intervalometer – once you start there’s nothing more for you to do till you stop.

Besides providing a somewhat decent foreground for my star trails, the large area of old historic fortifications is also a very popular location for light painting. So I figured if we each brought two sets of gear (cameras, lenses, tripods, remote triggers) we could use one set of gear for the stars and whilst they did their thing we could use the other for some light painting to while away the time.

So it was an intrepid bunch met at Middle Head Fort around 5PM one Saturday evening. We stuffed around for an hour or so working out where we’d like to shoot the stars, looking for a decent composition whilst also allowing us some freedom to lightpaint somewhere else in the interim. Once setup another half an hour doing some test shots and foreground shots. Finally just before 7PM I set my intervalometer in motion to capture the exposures for the trails.

Time for some light painting…

Up top is the result of Jason Baker experimenting with his hoop light painting tool. Here he and I are playing light painting coits :). The end result we all thought was quite interesting – organic and bizarre.

Below was actually our first experiment – Jason Ruth with a steel wool spin inside the tunnel on the left and I’m doing some blue torch on all the walls followed by some green in the circle of the gun placement in the middle. I was surprised how well the green luminescent pool worked.

The Grinding Pool

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 22 mm, 299 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

Then it was time for Jason to get into full flight – twin steel wool spins going mad in the pit below.

One Two Fight!

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 35 mm, 162 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Time for an obligatory run with my orb making tool. The lights in my orb tool unfortunately run very bright so we had to stop down to f/8 to keep it in check. This did however mean we had to burn in the EL wire a lot more to compensate for the stop of light loss. Jason Baker and I went nuts with this – both doing EL runs across the whole of the pit below. Jason Ruth meanwhile was creating what I called the duck throwing up on itself up on the right – perhaps I’ll just call it an exploding orb gone mad 🙂

Either way it got rid of another ten minutes waiting time 🙂

Orbageddon

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 22 mm, 594 sec at f/8, ISO 100

This started off with a simple steel wool spin – reversing away from the cameras and along this corridor and around and into the tunnel on the far left. What started as a simple thing evolved into this convoluted conglomeration. I wanted Jason Ruth to start much closer for this one – underneath the gantry above so we’d get and almost full rectangle of sparks flying before backing away with the spin. Along with the steel wool we have green torch on the right, blue on the left and combination red/blue EL wire on the floor.

Sliding Doors

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 556 sec at f/8, ISO 100

and straight our of a mental asylum comes this little number to finish of the evening – we were definitely done…

Middle Head Madness

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 16 mm, 256 sec at f/8, ISO 100

I’m often at home when conditions are ripe for great landscape photography. Such is the case when it is merely a hobby (tho a somewhat consuming one at that). The pressures of real life mean that you can’t always be out shooting, and I’m not sure I would want to. I savour those times when I can.

This usually means I’m limited to landscape shooting during those favourable hours around sunset and sunrise only on some weekends.

Firestorm

NIKON D600 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 102 mm, 1/20 sec at f/9, ISO 100

Some days however I can stare out my bedroom window and lament not being somewhere epic to make use of the epic conditions of nature spread out before me. Sometimes it’s a magic sunrise and other days it’s amazing light at sunset, whatever it is all I can do is just look and stare in wonder.

As it was this morning when at 6:30AM I looked outside just before sunrise and to the east the whole sky was lit up with what looked like giant flames licking up into the sky.

Something about the conditions and the clouds made it perfect for this fiery display.

Some days I even manage to get the camera out before it’s gone and snag a few quick shots out the window. No time for filters and sometimes not even a tripod. This day however the tripod was necessary and sometimes even the silhouettes are interesting…

Perched

NIKON D600 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 200 mm, 1/8 sec at f/9, ISO 100

and it’s back to the flames in the sky before they are done…

Flamable

NIKON D600 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 230 mm, 1/50 sec at f/9, ISO 100

Before I even set foot on the island I had this vision in my mind of an image looking down a long and winding road heading off into the distance. So when driving about the island I would often (much to my families distress) slow down and look and even at times stop and take some shots in the hope that maybe I would get the source material for a shot.

There were many stretches of road which had promise at various places on the island. I was looking for that perfect set of conditions with nice low green bushland to the sides of the road and a nice dark black winding road with the pencil white centre line. I know I don’t ask for much… 🙂

The Long and Windy Road

NIKON D600 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 300 mm, 1/320 sec at f/8, ISO 220

Having shot some test shots at a number of spots and with various focal lengths from wide (24mm) to long (70mm) (I almost always had the 24-70/2.8 on the camera body when we went out each day for our daily travels) I eventually settled on this spot on Cape Du Couedic Road in the Flinders Chase National Park.

This is on the road heading out to the Cape du Couedic lighthouse (and Remarkable Rocks and Admirals Arch) from the Flinders Chase Visitor Centre.

This particular spot had a nice high position so you could look down and see the road right down to the bottom and back up the other side of this little valley. I also tried shots along this stretch of road at various places and looking back from the other end but this is the compo I liked the best.

Unfortunately we were only ever here in the middle of the day so the light was always terrible. The first shot above was taken just before midday when were were heading out for the day and the shot below mid afternoon when we were coming back that same day. Both were shot near the long end of the 70-300mm lens, so in the end a very long focal length was the perspective I was looking for. A polariser would definitely have been handy but I didn’t have one (or a step up ring) for the thread diameter of this lens unfortunately.

The Winding Road

NIKON D600 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 280 mm, 1/400 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

Alas the shot needed many things and if I’d had the time I might have come back at a better time… By myself, with the tripod, a polariser and the time and patience to focus stack the image for front to back sharpness :). Still I’m relatively happy with the shot of what could have been :)… It’s essentially the composition I wanted but not the execution… perhaps part of an excuse to return here one day…

Was on a wet bushland photowalk with some friends on a drizzly day when we came across an interesting looking black fungi poking out amongst the debris on the ground.

I’d brought my Tamron 90mm Macro lens this day (in anticipation of the chance of some macro work) so it was a quick change of lenses and setup on the tripod to take a shot.

Blackhole

NIKON D600 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/10 sec at f/8, ISO 100 x 32 Frames

This particular fungi looked almost like the horn of a saxaphone with a wide mouth funnelling down to a longer stem attaching it to the ground. Shooting at a slight angle to the plant meant a reasonably nice composition but lot of limitations with regards to depth of field (at these very close distances to a subject this small the depth of field is extremely thin). The flattest area from a depth perspective was shooting from above at the top surface and even that was quite ruffled and I had no expectation of getting any of the hole inside the plant in focus.

So I setup my tripod to shoot from above and planned to use a technique I’d used before but hadn’t for some time now – that of Focus Stacking. Some interest in Focus Stacking within my Arcanum cohort reminded me of this technique and I looked to apply it here.

The shot up top is the result of focus stacking thirty two (32) manually taken frames shot at f/8 and 1/10th of a second at ISO 100. Down here right on the ground in this scrubby patch of bush there wasn’t really any wind to speak of so I wasn’t worried about the shutter speed or my subject moving.

With the camera firmly locked down and the lens in manual focus mode I proceeded to take shot after shot (using a remote wireless trigger in one hand). At the same time I manually adjusted the focus ring of the lens with the other hand between shots. I was aiming to take shots from slightly this side of the nearest part of the fungi I wanted to be sharply in focus all the way through the fungi to the farthest part I wanted in focus (somewhere inside the canal of the fungi).

The trick here is to rotate the focus ring ever so slightly and gently so that:
– the individual frames overlap slightly in their areas/depths of focus
– and to not bump or move the camera
Because I don’t have any mechanical tools or electronic aids to determine the amount of focus shift required I basically wing it and hope I do a good enough job with my micro focus adjustments. Ideally I take more shots than are needed and not less (because then there will be areas of out of focus between areas of focus through my subject).

As you can see from the end result above I did a pretty good job.

To give you an idea of how little depth of field we have to work with – here is one of the individual frames shot at f/8 showing the tiny sliver of the subject in the depth of field.

NIKON D600 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/10 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Before shooting any of the stack I also shot some images stopped down to try and get enough depth of field to cover my subject in one shot.

This first was shot at f/22 and it’s actually not too bad – much of the top surface is in apparent focus. The funnel inside is definitely not and there are definite areas of the frill of the fungi which are out of focus. Lastly the background whilst definitely blurred is a bit too busy and distracting.

NIKON D600 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1.3 sec at f/22, ISO 100

The second shot was throwing the whole kitchen sink at it – shot at f/64 and 10 seconds we have remarkably little if any movement and the depth of field is really very good – tho still not right down in the funnel. Very few lenses for 35mm cameras can even stop down to f/64 which is a really tiny aperture and we’re now firmly entrenched into diffraction territory (tho the results here look pretty good). However the background really starts to become very apparent and is totally distracting rather than being the nice soft bokeh blur of the focus stacked image.

NIKON D600 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 10 sec at f/64, ISO 100

Lastly here’s one hedging my bets – shot at f/36 (still well into diffraction territory) but the DoF covers all the top frill of the fungi and the background is a little better but still pretty ugly.

NIKON D600 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 2.5 sec at f/36, ISO 100

Finally this one is a thirty six (36) image focus stack showing the whole fungi for reference.

Upper Brass

NIKON D600 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/10 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100 x 36 Frames

It was finally time for the rest of my family to also visit Remarkable Rocks so late in the afternoon we headed over 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.

Really Remarkable Rocks

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm, 1/160 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

Really!… not so much… but a bit of light entertainment… still someone else didn’t think so as they were removed by the time we got back to the carpark, some people just have no sense of humour 🙂

Ah… now that’s more like it…

Three on Three

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 28 mm, 1/160 sec at f/8, ISO 100

We spent about an hour at Remarkable Rocks (we didn’t stay for sunset – plenty of opportunity to come back for that – we hope…) and the girls enjoyed exploring the area and really checking out these amazing natural features. Plus clambering up and onto strange rock structures or doing interesting forced perspective tricks with the remarkable rocks to have their photo taken was a bit of fun.

Orange Rivers

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm, 1/80 sec at f/11, ISO 100

The wild beauty of this place perched on a massive granite boulder right on the edge of the southern ocean is incredible.

Wild Beauty

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 27 mm, 1/250 sec at f/8, ISO 100

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 42 mm, 1/125 sec at f/8, ISO 100

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm, 1/80 sec at f/8, ISO 100

This one was a little harder to do. Whilst I was happy to let my girls climb up on some of the much more tame areas this one was considerably more tricky.

My Girls and I

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 34 mm, 1/125 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Actually it was the getting down which was the trickiest (at least the getting down without a 5 metre fall and breaking of bones :)).

NIKON D600 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm, 1/250 sec at f/6.3, ISO 100