The Ballet Tree

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So its been weeks since I have gotten a chance to get out and spend a bit of time taking some photo's, between work, kids and domestic duties its hard to even fit a Sunrise session in – I have now finally tested the Samyang 14mm for what I originally bought it for.. astro work 🙂

I had a recent job doing a bit of night chopper work, which gave me the opportunity to further scope out this super cool tree that i have seen many times times in the past but never really stopped to take a decent shot. Also +Michael Domaradzki had a cool perspective on it awhile back which triggered the idea for some astro stuff.

So, finally i got a leave pass for a night out and thought.. sweet as, i can go and take a sequence of images and spend a bit of quality time by myself, you know, soul searching/rejuvenation etc. and surely no one else is silly enough to head out in the freezing cold at night at this spot, even though it is in a city of 5 mil….

This is a bit of how it rolled – parked the car and there was no one there it was around 9 ish, got myself setup and taking a few preliminary shots and a young couple turned up :-/ sure.. this is where i would have brought all my potential hot dates lol… anyway happy to share my quiet time and space i suppose 🙂 Shortly there after a bunch of dudes in the their cars rock up and I am like.. yeah great this is gonna be trouble.. but no.. they just rolled out with some torches and freaked out when they saw someone else out, ie me 🙂 …and my torch was much bigger 😉 lol. so my night out with a bit solitude was not so solitary… oh well.

I did not quite nail the right position with the earths axis of rotation here, i was trying to get it directly behind the tree, the tree itself is actually quite small and the camera is positioned only a few metres from it, its probably a 3 metre tree which has been sculptured by the sea breeze. The light at the bottom right is the industrial lights over Kurnell on the edge of Botany Bay.

My original scope out image : https://plus.google.com/+GerardBlacklock/posts/KKZ3uh7TgDE

Exif / shot love:
184 shots over the space of 2 hours.
Images are stacked in +Adobe Photoshop just using the lighten mode, the foreground/black image needed a bit of work to ensure it looked sensible with the background.
The side lighting is kindly provided by the SLSA Rescue base 🙂 could not have done it better myself, no additional torch lighting needed 🙂
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm Aperture: f/3.2 and Shutter Speed: 50.5 seconds
ISO 500
out front – a very bendy tree and some cool stars

https://blog.avernus.com.au/the-ballet-tree/

Stick family

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So my eldest daughter after lookign t the pictuire, says to me…
'hey dad, that looks like our family, the big one is you and the little ones are me, tickles and mum' 🙂

Even though she certainly lives up to her nickname 'chaos' with just about every day its a soul searching test of my patience, i still sit down at the end of the day after shes gone to bed and reflect quietly on the fact that I am lucky to be part of her life and a privilege to know..

way to go chaos… 🙂

Single shot, long exposure.

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14 and Shutter Speed: 186s
ISO 100
Out front – and Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x

Greener Pastures

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I wonder whether these dairy cows ever have the desire to check out whats on the other side of the fence? what you can't see in this image is there is nothing between me and this paddock of cows besides a cattle grid, which I only recently learned about how they actually work. Cows have a great field of view with those eyes on each side of their big heads, however the disadvantage of this 360 degree view is that their binocular and depth vision is pretty crap, hence when they see a cattle grid, its not that they cannot balance their dainty udders across, its more they get the perception thats its very uneven due to the high contrast in light…

so waddayaknow.. you learn something new every day 😉

anyways onto the picture, some cows really enjoying some very lush grass..

5 shot pano, all landscape orientation.

Stadium Stairs

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Its a long way down… and a lot further up.. lookign back on this, i can just feel the calf muscles burn.

Processed using +Nik Collection by Google hdrefex, great allrounder for automatically blending images.

Techie love:
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 1.6s (normal) 1/5s (under) and 13s (over)
ISO 100
out front – Allianz Stadium

Forever and a Day

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or until someone….

not that I am a pessimist or anything 😉

you could roll out a hundred different cliches together with the image, however, this time, i think the following is appropriate..

_this day
is one where you are not alone
but are with the only one
on top of the world_

congratulations peeps, whoever ya are 🙂 partially taken at my favorite park in Sydney

+Kitten KaboodleInc , wait until you see the tiny planet 🙂

Oxford Falls

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The best light for taking images of waterfalls is typically overcast and early morning or late afternoon, the soft light from the clouds and the less top down light create a much more dramatically lit scene than one at say close to midday and with the sun streaming down unabated. That said, and the last time I checked I can't control the weather.. (yet 🙂 ), hence sometimes you have to run with what nature throws you.

This was one such time, the sun was high, the shadows harsh, I had already promised myself to come back in more favorable conditions but I thought I would give it a shot anyways..all things considered I reckon it turned out alright. Its a 3 frame panorama with extra frame bracketed, the image was first blended together and layered which then allowed me to subsequently mask and select what shadows / highlights I wanted. This helped reduce the effect of the harsh conditions..

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 8s (normal exposure) 1s (underexposure) and 30s (over exposure)
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya 4stop ND and Hoya CPL

Waves

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What I really liked about this scene was the way the clouds, which were moving very fast seemed like waves on a beach rolling into the shore. This is a image from a few months ago at Circular quay, Anzac day sunrise to be exact.

This was taken using the B+W 10 stop filter and my 16-35mm f/4 lens, which is about a sharp as my 2 year old's plastic knife…. The combination of this lens and that filter creates 1) a fairly soft image but also more interestingly 2) lots of lateral aberrations, not just one colour, ie purple fringing, but depending on what side of the image you look at it could also be green…

Which leads me to a question for all you light room gurus.. LR is awesome for correcting this stuff, however I would like to apply the defringe (under lens corrections) to only selective parts of the image, to prevent it doing weird stuff to places where purple is meant to be 😉 ideally i want to be able just to selectively apply it to the left side of some buildings for example..
I know you can use a control point, however it only gives you a option for defringe, not the full control ie purple/cyan control…

I pulled another swifty on this one.. I had taken a test shot at super high iso just to check the composition, the B+W filter is screw in so getting the compo right is a bit harder than when using the slide in filter types. In the final exposure of 309 seconds, the two boats in the foreground where a bit on the blurry side from the movement, hence I just layered a small part from the test shot onto the final image, even at high iso it was ok and really only accounted for a tiny part of the frame. That said even at the high iso the noise control is pretty darn good anyways…a little selective noise reduction and its pretty hard to tell 😉

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f8 and Shutter Speed: 309.6s
ISO 100
Out front – B+W 10 stop ND.

#b+w

tickles

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blurry- i have plenty of these shots, trying to capture kids in the moment is akin to finding a needle in a haystack, however, like most parents, sometimes the favorites are not the technically brilliant ones, but simply those which capture the spirit and moment…

and this one does that.. but it's darn blurry 🙁 this is quintessential tickles .. toothy smile and full of laughter, for the record, the laughter was all about watching dad's expression as we tried to stick our grubby little snot covered fingers on my nice clean super wide angle lens 🙂 this shot is about 15 centimetres from her face..

so now, off to find my cleaning gear 😉

Techie love:
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm Aperture: f/5 and Shutter Speed: 1/80s
ISO 320
out front – tickles

Single

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Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 19mm Aperture: f9 and Shutter Speed: 303.4s
ISO 100
Out front – and Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x and the LEE bigstopper.

1…2….3.. go

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These dried dandelions are a great find at the park, especially the ones which are fully intact and just waiting for a 6 year old to launch them into the air:)

Chaos is pretty good with theses, tickles on the other hand (and i will post a image of her effort) still has not quite grasped the concept of exhaling onto the item, rather eating them seems to be more fun 😉

I have processed this one different to what I normally do, just to try and mix it up, I guess it has taken on a bit of a sepia style, but i am liking it at the moment, the desaturated warm colours seem to really work with her dress (thanks Gran) and the park trees…

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 85mm f1.4 @ 85mm Aperture: f2.2 and Shutter Speed: 1/320s
ISO 125
chaos and the dandelion!

Time

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stands still for no one, it does however pause….. for well constructed jetties.

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 307.5s
ISO 100
Out front – and Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x and the LEE bigstopper.