Rodney Campbell's Blog

It was time for us all to travel across the border from South Australia to Victoria to the sleepy little coastal town of Port Fairy where we’d be spending the rest of our holidays. We’d booked two appartments at a nice little place on the main street – one for our family and one for my sister in law’s.

It was only about a two and a half hour drive there so we still had much of the day to explore and get lost :).

Handy Wave

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 369 sec at f/11, ISO 50

Whilst the others continued to check out the many boutique little shops in the main street I decided to head out to the beaches on the eastern side of town. I’d seen what looked to be a number of Groynes along the beach on Google Maps and was hoping to recce the spot for a potential sunrise or sunset shoot.

Initially I’d parked too far south along the beach but I could see a number of wooden structures on the beach further up so after a quick adjustment to my location I was here.

Unfortunately the tide was fairly low so the structure was mostly out of the water. A quick check of the tides however showed that this was actually close to the daytime high tide at this time of the year.

I decided to make best use of the conditions now whilst I had them (there were at least some clouds in the sky and the wind was blowing so they were moving quite rapidly). It was time to put together some daytime long exposures.

The image up top is the result of a six minute long exposure using the Heliopan CPL, the Lee BigStopper and a Lee 3 Stop Grad over the sky.

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.

Below we have a more conventional shot which I’ve still stretched out to 4 seconds to slightly smooth out the water.

Holding back the Tide

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 4 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Finally I was looking to put together a really simplified composition and ended up with this vertical composition looking straight along the Groyne from above. I really like the feeling of loneliness and being lost with this image, though in the interests of full disclosure my wife doesn’t like it at all :).

Lost in Time

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 20 mm, 246 sec at f/11, ISO 100

After dinner that evening I went out again in search of a decent sunset location. This bridge – which crosses the Moyne River (and is the only vehicular bridge in town) is just a minute from our accommodation. Even with just a few minutes travel time I still arrived too late and what little colour there was in the sky was done before I was setup. That’s what happens when you leave right on sunset :(.

This 400 second long exposure with the Lee LittleStopper was the best I could manage in the rapidly falling light.

Streaks on Moyne

NIKON D750 + 16.0-35.0 mm f/4.0 @ 19 mm, 405 sec at f/13, ISO 50

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