Even when things seem hopeless, always persevere

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D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14 and Shutter Speed: 247.7s ISO 100 Out front - Lee Graduated Filter 0.6x and Lee Bigstopper

D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14 and Shutter Speed: 247.7s
ISO 100
Out front – Lee Graduated Filter 0.6x and Lee Bigstopper

Life throws alot of things at you, some good, some bad.. in the absence of any useful advice, persevere is the only course of action…well thats what I reckon anyway 😉

Cruising down the parade at Sans Souci on the edge of Botany bay things seemed pretty dire from the photographic perspective; the clouds were heavy, rain was falling and sandy shore and picnic areas were littered with rubbish providing that extra incentive to drive on..

However in the face of crap-ville (photographically speaking, Sans Souci is not really that bad 😉 ) I pulled up at the carpark that I had found on google maps just near the ruins of a old sea pool / shark net..damn i love google maps, its like a treasure trove of stuff that when viewed from a dinky little satellite could be either nothing or something, in any case, without the maps i would not be there 🙂

I donned the rain coat and whacked my camera rain cover (code for plastic ziplock bag and rubber band) on and headed out into the rain. The location is actually pretty cool, fitting well with my minimalist phase 🙂 there are a number of old poles which previously held some kind of shark net which just make for awesome subjects.

I forgot my freaking polariser which would have helped a bit in this scene, but, one must deal with these kind things…

Single shot, long exposure, the rain cloud had just passed and engulfed the opening of Botany Bay, i took a test shot, of 3 minutes, in which time a small wave sunk my tripod, so this was the second take on the shot

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14 and Shutter Speed: 247.7s
ISO 100
Out front – Lee Graduated Filter 0.6x and Lee Bigstopper

 

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

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

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.

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.

Navigation at the edge

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A little Sneaky Sunday sunrise at Bradleys head, the wind was cold, the parking ticket machine ate money and gave no love, the sky uninspiring and the water cold. The company was better 😉 +Rodney Campbell and +Deb Mooney.

This is the view of Sydney that I like 🙂

Exif love:
Single image
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/16 and Shutter Speed: 186.1s (that 0.1 made all the difference)
ISO 100
out front – Lee Graduated 0.9x Filter and LEE fatstopper

Glass Lake

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don't slip over the leaf or trip on the broken plank

I always love a good cliche jetty shot, couple this with a long exposure and for some reason the scene turns into something out of a dream. Maybe its the vanishing point, maybe its the lack of a boat or lack of a person, or the softness.. i dunno …

To be honest, its pretty well a lazy man's style of shot, not really pushing the envelope at all, but I still love seeing these scenes and they seem to never grow old in my head. I did try and include the leaf to provide a little catch ya attention and really spring that eye back from the vanishing jetty 🙂 .

Exif love:
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/10 and Shutter Speed: 192.2s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL, Lee Graduated 0.9 Filter and the Lee bigstopper filter

https://blog.avernus.com.au/glass-lake/

The rough side of town

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Smoothign out the rough bits - (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/13 and Shutter Speed: 189.1s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL. and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x (3 stops) and Lee bigstopper

smoothing out the rough bits

Single frame, long exposure
Exif/setup love:
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/13 and Shutter Speed: 189.1s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL. and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x (3 stops) and Lee bigstopper

Zig Zag Coogee

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Zig Zag Coogee - (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

Zig Zag Coogee – (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock
D7000 with Nikkor 17-55mm f2.8 @ 55mm – Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: lots of seconds
out front – +HoyaFilters CPL and Lee Graduated Filter (0.9x)

Probably the most typically composed shot you will find of this location at Coogee (Ross Jones Pool) The edges of the sea pool lend themselves to being composed with cool S curve, whether its down low, or up high I think it works pretty well.

This particular morning Rod and myself met up with the initial plan to shoot this pool and maybe check out the next couple of ones along, however we did just hang at this one, in hingsight, i think we could have avoided all those othe rphotographers and gone to Wiley Baths of something – especially avoided that dude who came in and set up right in front of us (which by the way was in this shot, bottom right, but got cloned out)

Nonetheless, here is to the world of cliche, S curves at Ross Jones Pool.

Single frame, cropped to a vertical pano
Techie data:
D7000 with Nikkor 17-55mm f2.8 @ 55mm – Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: lots of seconds
out front – +HoyaFilters CPL and Lee Graduated Filter (0.9x)

Softness is.. North Bondi

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Softness is .. North Bondi - (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

Softness is .. North Bondi – (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock
D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/5.6 and Shutter Speed: 248.4 seconds
ISO 400
out front – Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x, a very tall cliff and lots of rocks.

It was well past sunset and there was nothing but a warm glow from where the sun had disappeared over the city skyline, with almost no moon it was a perfect time for some long exposures without the need for filters.

I did however have a graduated filter on the sky to enable more light from the lower part of the scene to be captured, additionally with the use of a super powered torch I lit the scene from an adjacent rock several steps from to right. The rocks down in the ocean are artificially lit along with that part of the cliff face on the right. The warm tip on the cliff is from the argon street lights a hundred metres of so away.

Whilst the composition was not quite what I wanted, i do like the smooth water and punchy rocks, hence it made it off the cull list 😉 I also think a star trail view from this very spot could really make it sing, you can see a few of the star trails from the 250 seconds long exposure

Techie Love

Burning Galaxy

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Probably the last of the images of the 'gerry tree' which I will post, however similarly to Rodneys version I did take a partial liking to the vertical composition and also the option for a milkway background to the wool spin. This image was taken from a recent trip with +Rodney Campbell and +Suren J to the Stockton Dunes, by the way chaps, it is quite possible to walk to the ship wreck too, keen? 😉

Two frames manually blended together, one for the milkway and one for the steel wool spinnage.
Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with a sand filled Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/6.7 ISO 100 and Shutter Speed: 169s (steel wool)
Aperture: f/2.8 ISO 3200 and Shutter Speed: 25s (milkyway)
out front – nada,

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed.

Spiral vs Spiral

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The natural vs the unatural
The old steelwool is getting pretty cliche nowadays, however its still fun to bring it out to jazz up a landscape. It was only a afterthought to bring along the gear and pack a ciggy lighter, which by the way really should have gotten lost, that darn thing with the safety lock means you could not burn down a gas station, i think i wore off all my skin on my thumb just trying to get a freakin' spark.

Well there was no chance of burning nuttin' down out there, with the recent rain, like 1 hour before hand and teh well.. serious lack of fuel the only thing burning was my thumb.
Although, if +Rodney Campbell had his way i reckon he woulda burnt the tree down 😉
Anyway, enough whingeing, here ya have it, the spiraling galaxy vs the spiraling of three nutters out on a freezing winters night in the middle of some sandy sand dunes.

Single frame – +Gerard Blacklock on da wool, +Rodney Campbell on the colours and +Suren J on the white fill.
Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with a sand filled Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/6.7 and Shutter Speed: 376.8s
out front – nada, yep nothing
to the left and right was Suren and in the tree was Rod.

btw +Rodney Campbell this would have been a perfect place for star trails – the centre of rootation is in the perfect spot in this frame..

oh well, have to go back now 🙂

The frozen world below

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Along the Zenith Line
Continuing a fine tradition of cloudless sunrise's with very little colour means one must work a bit harder to achieve that shot that gets a few star rating.
What I really liked about this spot was that at the time the rock behind me created a shadow across the gulley and it meant I could turn that foreground into some a bit more interesting – with a long exposure of course 🙂
I pulled the graduated filter all the way down to the shadow line to preserve the highlights in the bright sun drenched rock and also the hill beyond, I then exposed the frame during some of the rare swells which washed up over the finger rock creating some nice blue and surreal colours.
This was in the same train of thought as a recent image from kurnell (https://plus.google.com/100975265940134223422/posts/5GBrbgqpp2n)

Single frame – glad to say all the dust bunnies are gone sine the last long exposure at Kurnell.
Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with a sand filled Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 184.8s
out front – LEE graduated filter 0.9, LEE bigstopper and screw in circular polariser

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed.

Sweetness and light

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Wisps of souls lost and the path to..
Last shot of the morning, no clouds, mid morning and the sun was climbing – another example of transforming the seascape into something that the human eye just cannot observe.

I really wanted a isolated rock in the ocean, however things were getting a bit hectic down there on the green, hence I had to make do with what I had.

This is Kurnell, adjacent to the outflow pipes 😉

Single frame – i think i better clean my sensor, when the clone tool starts putting in dust spots you know its getting a bit crowded in there 🙂
Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with Nikkor 17-55mm f2.8 @16mm Aperture: f/19 and Shutter Speed: 182.4s
out front – LEE graduated filter 0.9, LEE bigstopper and screw in circular polariser

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed.

Midday Seascapes – Coalcliff

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Coalcliff, NSW, Australia, part of the great region just south of Sydney. Coalcliff is called that for the literal meaning, the cliffs here oozing with coal, you can see the layers of coals in the cliffs and quite often when snorkelling/diving down here there is lots of it on the seabed.

Continuing my quest for some reasonable hour seascapes, i found this little gulley exposed by the low tide, the water trickling over the rock is actually coming from behind me on the other side of the headland/rockshelf, the waves were pumping and sending large amounts of water across the shelf to run off at this spot, by the time it got here is was nothing but a little trickle , thankfully 🙂

This image was taken shortly after the one in this post and with the same settings, simply recomposed and focused.:
https://plus.google.com/100975265940134223422/posts/WkZK7GJ1aku

Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/11 and Shutter Speed: 132.9s
out front – LEE Bigstopper, LEE graduated filter 0.9 and screw in circular polariser

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed.