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Headed to Malabar (South Maroubra) on the weekend for a very early morning shoot on the coast with Gerry and Mj. Sunrise was at 6:20AM and it was a 30 minute walk through the scrubby bushland along the clifftops to our destination so we needed to meetup at 5:20AM.

When we arrived there was a very cool bunker built right on the clifftop which had some interesting graffiti on it, we also got a little cloud action and some nice colour in the sky but most of the more interesting cloud was over the land and came after sunrise.

Eye on the edge of Nowhere (about ten minutes before sunrise)


Smoke Signals (a few minutes after sunrise)


It was then Bigstopper action time...

Stop the Ocean (25 minutes after sunrise)


then since Gerry and I have screw in 10 stop ND filters with all the lee filter gear screwed in front of that we started doing guess the composition, grad setting and exposure when we moved our cameras around for various different bigstopper compositions by "feel"

which resulted in what is probably my personal favourite of the morning...

Turbulence


and

Weeping


On the way back out along the coastline Gerry and I checked out another graffiti laden bunker inland as well as trying some quick run and gun macro and floral landscape work (now that we could actually see what was there during the daytime - when we came in it was pitch dark ) - there was a huge abundance of native flowers out all along the coastal scrub - I'll post a couple pics later.

The coastline was very nice and I'd like to return in better conditions to try some landscape compositions with all the flowering flora...

These certainly look like the early morning was worth it. They do have an "overcooked" look to them though.

All pretty good with the HDR, Rodney.

The subject, composition and treatment of #4 is excellent - it has the most appeal to me.

I think you'll find these are all HDR free... but full of filter madness

aim54x wrote:These certainly look like the early morning was worth it. They do have an "overcooked" look to them though.

Thanks Cam - do you mean "saturation" (I didn't do a lot in that area in post) or "detail" (I did crank the clarity a bit on some and have been trying some new stronger localised (masked) sharpening lately in LR)

the foto fanatic wrote:All pretty good with the HDR, Rodney. The subject, composition and treatment of #4 is excellent - it has the most appeal to me.

Mj wrote:I think you'll find these are all HDR free... but full of filter madness

Yep - no HDR here - I was using Lee 0.9 and 0.6 hard grads stacked + CPL for the first two and 10 Stop ND + Lee 0.9 grad + CPL for the last three so yes lots of filters...

Thanks Trevor - #4 is my fav as well although my wife prefers the last

#4 would be my pick too. I would be happy with them all, good work.

#1 is my favourite, the only thing that hits me with this shot is bright water on the RHS of teh image, I think that needs to be toned down somewhat..especially since the white draws teh eye but also competes with the warm gold of teh sunrise.

#2 has alot of merit, but I reckon you missed the perfect time for this one, 5 minutes prior would have been on the money, this would have given less dynamic range and potentially a nice star burst as teh sun popped over teh clouds. The gold colour looks inconsistent, ie more saturated closer to sun, possibly saturating (if you did) and feather it out more, as it is it looks like the sun has been cut and pasted in (which i know it is not )

#3 any blown highlights here? capturing that nice natural colour of the sydney sandstone is actually a lot harder then it looks, I would look to (as the very first processing step) reduce teh exposure by 1 or 1.5 stops then proceed with your normal processing steps, this, I find helps alot with those narky blown reds.

Geoff M wrote:#4 would be my pick too. I would be happy with them all, good work.

Thanks Geoff

biggerry wrote:#1 is my favourite, the only thing that hits me with this shot is bright water on the RHS of teh image, I think that needs to be toned down somewhat..especially since the white draws teh eye but also competes with the warm gold of teh sunrise.

Thanks Gerry - I'd already done some rework on #1 (somewhat triggered by Cam) and I've now tamed some of the bright as you suggest...

#2 has alot of merit, but I reckon you missed the perfect time for this one, 5 minutes prior would have been on the money, this would have given less dynamic range and potentially a nice star burst as teh sun popped over teh clouds. The gold colour looks inconsistent, ie more saturated closer to sun, possibly saturating (if you did) and feather it out more, as it is it looks like the sun has been cut and pasted in (which i know it is not)

agreed - again another I revisited - however you are correct in that I had done a local adjustment on and around the sun - not for saturation but pulling the highlights down (which had as a byproduct increased saturation in a circle). I've also ditched that and let the highlights blow.

#3 any blown highlights here? capturing that nice natural colour of the sydney sandstone is actually a lot harder then it looks, I would look to (as the very first processing step) reduce teh exposure by 1 or 1.5 stops then proceed with your normal processing steps, this, I find helps alot with those narky blown reds.

In the original no blown highlights - but yes it looked in general overexposed. I had locally reduced the exposure over the land only by about 3/4 of a stop - I've done some more work (grad adjustment + others to bring down the exposure more overall esp over the top half) - thanks...



Thoughts?

I like the first and fourth. Because of colours
and composition.

Bloody spectacular!