Portal-licious

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Portal-licious - (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

Portal-licious – (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock
143 frames (startrails) (2 frames for the foreground exposures)
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/5 and Shutter Speed: 60s (each star trail frame) and around 300s for the lighting painting frames.
ISO 800 for the trails. and 100 for everything else
out front – some funky windchime.
Lightpainting: lots of Blue EL wire around the base and EL footprints

super sized windchime
So I had a few hours to burn between jobs midweek so I ducked out for a quick squizzy at the Sclupture by the sea (http://www.sculpturebythesea.com/)
Things were pretty quiet and I had free reign of the place and only had to share this glorified wind chime with a few togs, including some dude doing some timelapse on a dolly, it would be very interested to see how they turn out, so if your the dude there msg me 😉
The lights on the sculpture are a bit of a pain and I did consider turning them off, but it would have been pretty obvious 😉 the red colour makes this tricky since this is the colour that burns out first, i really need to do some more research on blending the dark shots to the startrails, anyone got any good tips?

Exif/setup data:
143 frames (startrails) (2 frames for the foreground exposures)
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/5 and Shutter Speed: 60s (each star trail frame) and around 300s for the lighting painting frames.
ISO 800 for the trails. and 100 for everything else
out front – some funky windchime.
Lightpainting: lots of Blue EL wire around the base and EL footprints

Ghouls, gals and the search for the portal

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Ghouls, gals and the search for the portal - (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

Ghouls, gals and the search for the portal – (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock
134 frames
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/4 and Shutter Speed: 60s (each star trail frame) and around 500s for the lighting painting frames.
Iso 640 for the trails. and 100 for everything else
out front – expenise grave site.
Lightpainting: lots of Blue EL wire around the base, LED torch selectively applied with the street lighting off to the left

Sneaky Sunday Night startrails
I don’t think I would have ever thought that I would end up (alive anyway) sitting amongst a whole stack of rather upmarket grave sites taking star trails shots and eating pizza.
That said, the idea had crossed my radar a few times before and with the conditions just right with moon rise well into the wee hours of the morning this was another great location with very little light pollution (excluding all them planes)

Unlike the previous Malabar session I decided to make the effort and clone out all the boats and plane trails, alittle tedious, but for this one probably worth the effort.
All images loaded into a stack in PS CC and individual layers adjusted to remove the offending aircraft and boat trails.

Similarly to the previous session it appears my version of the +My Nikon Life Nikkor 16-35mm f4 does some weird stuff. It would appear that the right hand side of the image has significantly less sharpness than that of the left, this is the same as the malabar session which i had put down to some weird phenomenon, the fact that its noticeable even on a fairly low resolution jpegs has me concerned, reviewing some of the other images it appears to be severely exacerbated at f4 and improves when stopping down.

So, how does a lens be sharp on one side and not the other? maybe misaligned glass elements? has anyone else experienced this? anyone wanna take a few test shots at f4 to compare?

So back to the cemetery, no ghouls were spotted, but i certainly had my peepers nice and wide looking, a little bit.. well ok, lets be honest a swamps worth of blue EL wire and just a smattering of red completed the foreground shot, noting that the stock standard original foreground of the star shots actually looks pretty good also, the street lights off to the left (couple of hundred metres away) gave some nice natural side lighting.

No ghouls or grave sites were harmed nor disrespected in this session 🙂

Exif/setup data:
134 frames
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/4 and Shutter Speed: 60s (each star trail frame) and around 500s for the lighting painting frames.
Iso 640 for the trails. and 100 for everything else
out front – expenise grave site.
Lightpainting: lots of Blue EL wire around the base, LED torch selectively applied with the street lighting off to the left

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

Opening the Portal

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Openign the Portal - (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

Openign the Portal – (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/4 and Shutter Speed: 60s (each star trail frame) and around 300s for the lighting painting frames.
Iso 640 for the trails. and 100 for everything else
out front – Malabar bunker for munitions.
Lightpainting: Red and Blue EL wire around the base. Steel wool spin on top the building, LED torch selective applied..

time stands still as the universe parts
other dimensions, dark matter, particle mass, Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this stuff is soo cool, I remember learning about the theory of general and special relativity at uni at it was so intereesting yet was like turning your brain inside out to understand , needless to say I now remember nothing of it,… except it was damn cool and and that Einstein bloke was pretty clever 😉

Well, this session was a bit of a fail, however looking on the bright side, its certainly dark enough for a some trails!

15-20 minute bush bash to get to the location, in the dark of course and with the wind howling, followed by several setup shots and then another 2 hours of mind numbing boredom (oh I suppose you were not that bad Rodney Campbell 😉 ) whilst huddling in a corner of the rock and bunker to keep outta the wind.

The sand and wind reminded me of Anna Bay and stockton beach during which my camera and lens filled up with sand !

I opted for a different take, rather than a clean set of trails, I threw everything at it, its chaos!

So Rod, next time we will just go back to North Bondi eh? 20 metres from the car, pizza down the road, no sand, no wind…

The star trails are made up of 117 shots stacked together in +Adobe Photoshop using the statistics method, this image was then manually blended with a couple of foreground shots. The blend modes varied from lighten to screen and were selectively applied

Exif/setup data:
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/4 and Shutter Speed: 60s (each star trail frame) and around 300s for the lighting painting frames.
Iso 640 for the trails. and 100 for everything else
out front – Malabar bunker for munitions.
Lightpainting: Red and Blue EL wire around the base. Steel wool spin on top the building, LED torch selective applied..

No wildlife harmed or fires started, however i sustained many little burns due to that wind blowing that wool spin all over me. Might wear jeans next time 😉

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

The Devil Within

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Devil Within - (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

Devil Within – (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock
D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 481s
out front – Some fairly large bunker style munitions base.
Lightpainting: Red and Blue EL wire around the base. Blue LED from within the building, white LED torch selective applied.

Its never scary trekking down the side of cliff where its only metres from the edge of death to find some dodgy old bunked in the middle of the night.. you know why? cause its dark and you cant see the bottom to be scared 😉

Rodney had some hair brained idea to check out this bunker perched on the cliffs at North Head, my confidence in him was waning after the first navigation decision to head into some somewhat less dense scrub was a result of him with his phone planted on his face looking at ingress…
“really man.. its literally just metres over there” rod says.
easy for him wearing jeans and all 😉
anyway we did an about turn and followed the well defined path right to it 😉

Back to the bunker of death on the edge of the world – this was a bit hairy, luckily I had no hair left on my legs from the previous scrub bashing so the fear factor was low 😉
Without seeing more in daylight we did limit ourselves to the safety of the bunker surrounds and as a result came up with soime EL wire craziness coupled with a blue LED torch inside the bunker. The surrounds were lit (separate frame) with a white LED just to give some texture and detail to the cool rocks and grasses.

Cheers for a good night Rodney Campbell , next time I am navigating and your wearing the shorts 😉

Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 481s
out front – Some fairly large bunker style munitions base.
Lightpainting: Red and Blue EL wire around the base. Blue LED from within the building, white LED torch selective applied.

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

Cosmic Spew

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Cosmic Spew - The search for the Portal (c) Gerard Blacklock

Cosmic Spew – The search for the Portal (c) Gerard Blacklock

The search for the Portal

In a continuation from some more recent lightpainting (https://blog.avernus.com.au/searching-for-the-portal-4/) I do not dare find out what Chaos would think of this image 😉

For this one I teamed up with Rod for some more shenanigans of the EL wire, and steel type, we managed to squeeze this in in amidst of Rodneys hunt for portal keys in

Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: >200s
out front – Some fairly large bunker style munitions base.
Lightpainting: Red and Blue EL wire around the base. Steel wool spin from within the building, white LED torch selective applied.

No wildlife harmed (in particular the armies of possums) or fires started

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