Posts Tagged ‘exposure’

February 26th, 2010 Photo Blog 020 – Experimenting with flash, some examples

Good morrow kind sirs,

I decided to give Sonia a break from modelling for me last night by giving some self portraits a go as she went off and did her thing taking some twilight shots of the Opera House and city skyline. I felt a little dorky setting up my tripod and light stand and posing for myself whilst all the tourists passed by – I got over the whole self-consciousness thing pretty sharpish though mostly by harnessing my powers of ignoring.

I think I got the lighting and shadows on my face just right in this shot, giving enough of an angle to de-fatten my face (you’ll see some not-so-good examples in a minute). Underexposing the background a couple of stops resulted ina really nice deep warm glow just behind the silhouetted city buildings and overall I thought this was my best effort.

Going through the bunch of photo’s I came back with I hit across a couple of examples which sprang the idea to make this into a bit of a tips/how-i-did-it post. Read the rest of this entry »

July 26th, 2009 Photo Blog 001 – La Perouse

Bare Island, La Perouse

I have decided that it might be a nice idea to make an article or feature each time I go out shooting at a particularly interesting place. Seeing as my new home of Sydney seems to be surrounded by so many fascinating subjects to capture I am hoping that this can be fun, interesting and (most importantly for a photoblog) frequent!

So anyway, last night I went down to La Perouse to see if I could catch a nice sunset over Botany Bay and came away with a handful of decent shots. The sunset itself wasn’t as dramatic as it could have been but the nice golden light of the sun disappearing over the horizon did provide a very pleasant illumination of Bare Island.

Bare Island, La Perouse

All the while I was capturing shots of the island I was checking back behind me to see what the sun was doing and just before it disappeared for the night it gave us a little hint of the kind of spectacular pinks and oranges that can sometimes light up the sky on any given Sydney evening.

Botany Bay at sunset

So as the sun disappeared and the sky slowly turned dark I turned back around to try a long exposure shot of Bare Island, more to test out my newly acquired remote shutter release than anything else and to test if I am any good at figuring out getting a good exposure when I’m using BULB mode. So this next shot was a 60 second exposure at f16 and iso 100. Using Aperture Priority to figure out that 30 seconds at f11 would have given me the correct exposure, I then slipped into BULB mode to close my aperture to f16 to reduce the light by 1 stop. By doing so I knew that to get that one stop of light back I would need to double the exposure time to 60 seconds. In a roundabout way I think it worked – its a bit of a hack but there we go.

Bare Island at twilight

Here is one more shot of the bay, this time made of 3 exposures and hand-blended in photoshop using simple layer masks.

Botany Bay at Sunset

After a couple more less successful attempts at some even longer exposures I traversed the slippery rocks back up to dry land in pretty much pitch black and had one final go at a 6 minute exposure – this time of the tower at the top of the hill. In the 6 minutes that the shutter was open a few planes took off from Sydney Airport in the distance and added a couple of interesting streaks across the night sky. I don’t really know what it is that I like about this final shot, but there is just something about it that really takes my fancy. Possibly the kindof unreal look that the image has taken, but I don’t know.

La Perouse Tower at night.

I hope you enjoyed this short series of shots. I will be back soon with another batch of images soon!

To read more about La Perouse on Wikipedia, go here.

July 6th, 2009 Tidal pools – Maroubra beach

Hey there people!

I have been hunting on Flickr lately looking for some good spots around Sydney to take some snaps and one subject that caught my eye was a number of tidal pools on the cities eastern beaches.

Seeing as most of Sydney’s beaches are on the east coast, the ideal time to hit these spots is of course sunrise. I decided to head down to Maroubra beach this afternoon however to see if I could catch some luck and get a good shot or two of the Mahon tidal pool at dusk with some nice long exposures.

There was some nice soft pink light in the sky just as the sun was setting behind me so I was lucky enough to get a few nice long shots of the pool and sea smoothed out and all misty looking. There is also a street light very close by which tinted the scene somewhat. Some people might correct this in post processing to get a more natural look but I quite liked it how it was.

I wasn’t quite able to get the shots I wanted though as the sea was insanely rough and the tide was high, so getting right down close to the pool was impossible. I did have to leg it for safety more than once to save myself getting soaked! Also, there was barely a cloud in the sky, so the shots were a little low on drama compared to what I would have liked.

I did very little post processing on these shots, only increasing the exposure a little and some spot removal in Lightroom and of course the panorama was stitched together in PP too. For a first attempt at this subject and my first time at the location I am pretty pleased with the results.

A few thoughts for next time:

• Clean the lens after every shot – I could have saved myself a lot of time removing all the spots from my images if I had removed the spray from the lens at the time! Should have known how much spray would be on my camera given how choppy and windy it was.
• Invest in a remote trigger – even though I got some nice shots, exposing for longer than my camera’s 30 second maximum would have smoothed things out even more. Using a remote trigger I would be able to use bulb mode comfortably with the added bonus of reducing camera shake.
• Try to plan a visit when the tide is not quite so high. I would have loved to get right down to the edge of the pool.
• Figure out if the public transport system will be able to get me there before sunrise so I can capture the sun coming up over the horizon.

I had a lot of fun taking these pictures so I will definitely be doing some more, perhaps back at Maroubra or maybe straight off to another one of the many of these tidal pools around the city. Until then… Have fun!