Rodney Campbell's Blog

Where the River Leads

DJI Mini 3 Pro FC3582 + 6.7 mm f/1.7 @ 6.72 mm, 1/1500 sec at f/1.7, ISO 100

I recently picked up a new travel drone. The new DJI Mini 3 Pro

Man this thing is TINY… I mean really tiny !! and soooo light

I thought my DJI Mavic 2 Pro was pretty small compared to my previous Phantom 4 but the Mini 3 Pro totally takes the cake, it’s ridiculous

I also previously had the DJI Spark (which was just as light (250g)) but it was pretty much useless. Features wise, image quality wise and especially range and reliability of connection was woeful

Anyway I’m sure I’ll speak more on the DJI Mini 3 Pro later. But back to the image… this is a 3 shot vertical pano taken on a particularly foggy morning soon after the drone arrived 🙂

Out of Time

NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S @ 14 mm, 663 sec at f/8, ISO 100

We ended up doing two takes of this composition. Alas Gerry managed an unusual user error this evening when his first exposure of this was accidentally shot at f/2.8 instead of f/8. Thus blowing out the frame

I actually preferred almost everything about the first take we did (except the way I did the outer square pattern around the orb). I rectified this in the second take, but here I’ve posted the first take. You can check Gerry’s feed for his shot of the second take

Spider Time

NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S @ 14 mm, 123 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Gerry on a steel wool spin inside the spider filled tunnel, with a little selective torch work afterwards. I even added some red torch into the water in that channel in the middle at the bottom. It however ended up being way more subtle than I had anticipated

The spiders were really quite large (some as big as your outstretched hand). Alas all of the spiders were still there spookily watching us from the walls and roof even after the three steel wool spins. So they appear to be impervious and cared not one iota…

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images.

Gerry and I out light painting again… finally…

Dark Svirls

NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S @ 15 mm, 955 sec at f/8, ISO 100

So this is a new location I’d found scouring Google Maps (looking for urban tunnels in the Sydney metro area we could use for light painting)

This one is under a fairly major multi lane road and is part of a series of bush walking tracks

So during this nearly 1000 second (16 minute !) long extravaganza we have…

I’m doing my slowly being perfected LED umbrella orb. Gerry’s lighting the tunnel behind me and adding the blue EL wire madness. I’m highlighting a green EL wire river. There was actually quite a lot of water flowing here so the EL is basically just floating along in the rapidly moving water. Gerry’s doing some much more delicate lighting of just the mossy rock covered island in the middle. This actually took quite a bit of finessing and multiple practice takes 🙂

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images.