Smooth Botany Bay

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Somebody went and whacked a bunch of nets on my lovely isolated, minimal poles 🙁 oh well, on the bright side, you can now swim here without the fear of being chomped by a narky sharky.

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 mm f4 @ 20mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 272.4 seconds
ISO 100
Out front – LEE GND (0.6x) and Lee Bigstopper and Hoya CPL.

On the Edge

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of two worlds

I am going thru a bit of a pano phase at the moment, I really like the challenge of being able to slice a piece of scenery to show something different and to be able to capture additional elements that just can't be achieved in a single 6×4 frame.

As a true testament to the ease of pano taking, i shot a whole bunch of images (just about all panos) from this area and I reckon I was happy with just about every frame – thats pretty rare for me btw 😉

So the next time you out punching some light with that digital fang-dangle thing they call a camera or smart phone, consider the pano option and watch the world just open up to you 🙂

Happy freakin' hump day too.

View large or go home 😉

The image is made from 5 horizontal landscape images stitched together in PS, the kicker here is that simply by adjusting the exposure on each frame I could capture that sweet dark area under the foliage and also the relatively bright falls, having a cloudy day certainly helped too.

D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 32mm Aperture: f18 and Shutter Speed: varied from 5s to 30 seconds
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL.

Hudgee Nudgee

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Sometimes in life ya just get a result out, even if your not happy that its perfect

Thats gonna be my motto for the next day or so 😉 sometimes better to get a result out in a reasonable time frame then nothing at all…

I have a couple of shots from this morning similar to this one with various compositions etc, but have sat on them for quite a while, not quite happy with them, the sunrise is nice, but the composition is just not what I had in my head – hence whilst it is not what I necessarily wanted, better to get a result than none at all.

Exif love:
2 frames blended in PS
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f18 and Shutter Speed: 8s (over exp) 4s (normal exp)
ISO 100
Out front – LEE GND (0.6x) and Hoya CPL

Toothless Nipper

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Nipper Chaos - (C) Gerard Blacklock

chaosnippers

Well done Chaos, thats a season of Nippers done, whilst I have enjoyed the routine egg and bacon roll and coffee as you tear up and down the beach and in and out of the water, I think only one of has gotten fit 😉

A big hat tip to the great crew of instructors (Bluefit), dealing with these little nippers is a bit like herding cats on speed 😉

Seacliff

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Seacliff - (c) Gerard Blacklock

D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 mm f2.8 @ 45mm Aperture: f8 and Shutter Speed: 194.4s
ISO 100
Out front – LEE GND (0.3x)

up top

#‎seacliff‬ ‪#‎coalcliff‬

D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 mm f2.8 @ 45mm Aperture: f8 and Shutter Speed: 194.4s
ISO 100
Out front – LEE GND (0.3x)

Fallen

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tgif tomorrow 🙂

I love the way the logs have just fallen here, with alittle mad scrambling and contortionist moves i was able to get this view, the view is almost 180 degree view, i had to clone out my foot at the bottom 🙂

Exif love:
4 wide angle portrait orientation images stitched together to make a mammoth vertical pano, then cropped back a bit 😉
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 13s
ISO 100
Out front – CPL only, some logs and a few falls

In the Jungle

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ya gotta view it large, seriously, money back guarantee 😉

Exif love:
a bucketload of landscape orientation shots stitched together in PS this is about a 180degree view.
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14
Shutter Speed: 13s
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL.

Sylvia Falls

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Valley of the Waters

I really love this walk, I love it even more early in the morning, like just after the crack of dawn, its a very popular walk and thats a great thing for sure, however sometimes you just want a bit of space and not run into someone every 10 steps, hence thats where the early morning start comes in.

I trekked down to these falls shortly after sunrise, passing Empress falls on the way and passed two people, one was a fairly elderly lady coming up the valley, which meant she had probably walked all the way round from wennie falls – which is not a stroll in the park, the second was a chap about my age (thats young btw 😉 ) who was jogging, yes, you read that right.. jogging down the walk. I did not really know what to say to him, so 'gday mate' was about it, with a bit of disbelief admiration 🙂

Anyway's, the Sylvia Falls is a very popular photographic spot too, super easy to compose and most people go for the vertical, i did too when I first visited 🙂 however this time, and its kinda a phase I am going thru, i want to capture a pano of the falls, giving a bit of texture and context to the scene, showing the falls (which are very cool on the black rocks ), the drop to the right and also the sharp incline on the left where the path is cut in.

Strangely enough panoramas are actually quite easy to compose and in my opinion much more forgiving than say the standard 6:4 format, I say this since the brain reads from left to right (in most languages anyway), thus the image taker has already the advantage that the viewer will natural flow thru image when looking at it, that said, its also very easy in panos to create that dreaded 'big empty space' so getting right up close and personal can often work much better – see the next image from this same spot for an example…

There is one key flaw in this image and I blame photoshop 🙂 I cloned out / content aware filled the hand rail on the left, but by geez it did a rubbish job and I did not notice until the very end, I really should go back and fix that…

Exif love:
7 landscape orientation shots stitched together in PS
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 28mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 5s to 13s (note I changed the shutter speed as i took them to control teh exposure as I went around)
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL.

Under the Radar

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on so many levels 😉

So I thought I was a little deserving of an Easter weekend sunrise particularly given the fact that daylight savings starts shortly, and also there is no one to convince me otherwise at 4:30am 😉

The conditions are pretty variable in the Blue Mountains and this particular morning they really excelled 😉 I decided to take the lazy man's option and just go to one of the Grose Valley Lookouts where I did not have to walk very far, after spending an entertaining hour or so in the car listening to some quality radio talk back it became quite apparent that there was gonna be no sunrise and I could have probably just stayed at home in bed and taken a photo thru a white sheet to get the same effect 😉

Given that I had driven over an hour to get there, i thought I better take a walk and at least have a look, kinda lucky I did, once I got to one of the little lookouts and had just set up the camera the clouds broke and the valley appeared, literally like someone had just pulled the curtain back. I madly banged off a few shots and before I knew it the cloud rolled back in and I was back under the white sheet, well that was sunrise done 😉

What was pretty cool was that the scene just looked like two completely separate parts, the valley below was completely separate to the burning sky above – talk about timing, this was about 10 minutes before the sun was meant to rise..

Exif love:
8 portrait orientation shots stitched
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 35mm Aperture: f10 and Shutter Speed: 1.3s
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter (0.6x)