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.

Searching for the Portal

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Searching for the Portal - (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

Searching for the Portal – (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock

urban fire

Its been many weeks since I have had the opportunity to do some light painting, actually to do some photography fullstop 🙂 so on a sneaky session on the way home from work I tested out a cool location which myself, tickles and chaos had scoped out during our regular parklife tours.

Chaos after viewing the image said:
“Dad, what are you doing in that picture”
I did then try to (unsuccessfully) explain and I think chaos thinks I am a bit weird now 🙂
How do you explain wandering around in a dark park with torches, lights, steel wool and colourful wire all the while taking pictures?
In anycase I am sure chaos will be keen to help out in the EL wire application for the next image, she would rather use the steel wool spin, but dad’s OHS policy will prevent that.

Single shot
Exif/setup data:
D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @11mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: ~200s (and yes I know the exif says 33 secs, trust me its 200 seconds :))
out front – funky ass sculpture
Lightpainting: Red and Blue EL wire on the bridge. Red LED torch on the ground to the left, white LED torch from across the pond on the left, gerry spinning wool in the centre.

No wildlife harmed (except for that jumping fish 🙂 ) or fires started

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

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 🙂