A Wider view of Bradleys... - Rodney Campbell's Blog Rodney Campbell's Blog

A Wider view of Bradleys…

by Rodney Campbell on Feb.06, 2016, under Life, Photography

Whilst down at Bradley’s Head for sunrise I took a few sets of images for stitched panorama’s whilst I was there.

The first was a spur of the moment thing when I saw Gerry out at the end of the stone pier at Bradleys Head. He was shooting across the harbour towards the city and was positioned pretty nicely for me to shoot this quick sequence of images just ten (10) minutes before sunrise.

Taking in the View

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 58 mm, 8 sec at f/13, ISO 100 x 9 Frames

This was a stitch of nine (9) vertical frames taken at a slightly longer 58mm focal length with the very trustworthy 24-70/2.8.

I’d stacked the 3 stop Lee ND grad with the Heliopan CPL for this shot. Normally I don’t advocate using a polariser when shooting panorama frames but sometimes I just can’t be bothered to remove it and this time with a longer focal length it doesn’t matter as much.

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.

As with all things panoramic there’s an option to panospherise it to see what you get…

Life Raft

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 58 mm, 8 sec at f/13, ISO 100 x 9 Frames

Before going to Bradleys Head I had an idea for a shot in my mind – where I’d shoot very long exposures with both a vertical and a panoramic view of this Bradleys Lighthouse looking straight out from up on the headland looking out and down onto it. The idea being to have just the misty water behind the lighthouse for a super simplified scene.

Alas my plans were bust when I discovered the view from up top was pretty much obscured by some large vegetation. My idea wasn’t going to happen without some serious deforestation going on… probably not a great idea in a National Park :)…

So it was from down the bottom instead that I had to shoot.

I took seven (7) vertical frames at a mid 48mm focal length again with a 3 stop Lee ND grad stacked with the Heliopan CPL.

Gerry’s excellent Navigation at the edge where he’d completely cloned out all the city and land skyline behind was very much along the lines of what I had in my mind. So inspired by his super simplified rendition I figured I’d try the same with the editing of my own panorama. The result with near cloudless pastel skies goes quite a way towards what I’d originally had in mind…

Isolated at the End

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 48 mm, 2 sec at f/11, ISO 100 x 7 Frames

One other thing I can say about this final result – thank the lord that I’d taken one central test exposure before taking my pano sequence. The centre frames of the pano sequence were taken at 6:54AM and the single test frame was taken at 6:53AM. This was just a few minutes before sunrise this morning. Somehow that beautiful green light on the lighthouse must have automatically turned off in the minute between the central test frame and the pano sequence and thus in my pano the light is not on. I was able to simply layer my test frame on top of the final pano and align the images in photoshop and paint in the nice lit green light. I love it when a “plan” works :).

At the Edge of the World