Rodney Campbell's Blog

I guess we’ll just have to call this astro month. Time for a universal doorway to the stars

Universal Doorway

NIKON D750 + 12.0 mm f/2.8 @ 12 mm, 46 sec at f/2.8, ISO 640 x 118 Frames

OMG – after numerous location failures this evening we now needed a Plan D!!..

Gerry remembered a stone arch from our last trip here 7 years ago. So it was back up the gorge and around the coastal track a bit to this slightly less impressive than anticipated stone arch off the boardwalk

We had wanted to shoot star trails and the environmental conditions were actually pretty damn good for them. The minimal clouds had basically completely cleared now. It was 9:30PM, sunset was 2 hours ago and the moon was just a small 15% crescent behind us and would set within an hour anyway

Now it was time for me to stand motionless in the doorway whilst Gerry light painted up a storm. Half an hour and a number of takes later we’re done and it was time to start the trails shots and wait, and wait…

Sydney’s light pollution doesn’t allow shooting with more ideal dark skies style settings (like ISO 1600, f/2.8, 60 seconds). So we had to make do with Sydney dark skies settings (ISO 640, f/2.8, 45 seconds). Actually we should really have shot at 30 seconds to kill more of the ambient. Because we couldn’t be stuffed having 50% more RAW frames to deal with in post we went with the longer exposures 🙂

11:40PM and we’d had enough (of the waiting and the smell :)) so we packed it in and headed home…

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