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Part two from Sunday evenings Milsons Point to Kirribilli Sydney Photo Walk

Once the sun had set it was time to get ready for some twilight shots of the city - I wanted to do a wide stitched panorama including the Sydney Opera House, the city and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I tried a few different compositions and focal lengths but settled on the most zoomed on my 16-25/4 (35mm) as my preferred look.

The following two images ended up being my favourite panorama sets from the evening - both were taken around 8:30PM (just over half an hour after sunset) and both are the result of stitching 10 vertical frames (50% overlap) taken at 35mm and 30 seconds...

Of course these panoramas look much better bigger and even more awesome is the detail you get when zoomed 100% into the full 130 megapixel master images (you can see people walking around the harbour foreshore)

In fact you can click through these two panos to much larger versions I've uploaded...

Blue Hour over Sydney Harbour


Sydney Harbour Lights


When it had gotten quite dark and twilight was about at it's end we were about to pack up and go have dinner before heading home (my daughter was getting pretty hungry by this stage ). There were a few others still with me where I was shooting on this little rock causeway, and I asked if they wanted to do a little quick lightpainting... they were keen so...

Most of it didn't work out (the city itself was too bright and I'd only brought EL wire and no leds or other light painting instruments). However here is a little EL wire painting by my daughter (her first time effort )



and I then borrowed an off camera flash from someone and we setup this little scene which actually worked out pretty well I thought

I prefer the second. I don't like the 3rd with
that rock i the foreground. I think the 4th
should have work better having the person in
the foreground closer to the camera and the
landscape as a background.

First 2 images suffer from the 'empty foreground' syndrome. The others are excellent....the last is stunning!

Of the first two I prefer #1, it has a nice darkness to it, I find #2 has a bit too much reflected light. The last is a winner though!

zafra52 wrote:I prefer the second. I don't like the 3rd with that rock i the foreground. I think the 4th should have work better having the person in the foreground closer to the camera and the landscape as a background.

Thanks Zafra. #3 was just a bit of EL Wire play. With #4 we didn't do many takes (3) but I liked this one the best because of other factors. I had one with my daughter a bit closer but the lighting didn't turn out as well. That said given I can compare the different versions otherwise I think I still prefer this further away one because we get more of that strong shadow on the ground that I was going for - plus that little causeway wasn't very long and we had a bunch of cameras and tripods stacked up at this end so we didn't have a lot of room to play with

Matt. K wrote:First 2 images suffer from the 'empty foreground' syndrome. The others are excellent....the last is stunning!

Thanks Matt... and I hear you - although I was aiming for that all glassy water at the bottom look when I set up.

aim54x wrote:Of the first two I prefer #1, it has a nice darkness to it, I find #2 has a bit too much reflected light. The last is a winner though!

Thanks Cam - and I too prefer the dark blue (and the sunset colours on the horizon) in the first - but I preferred the lighter lights (building on the left and the city) and some reflections on the water but I too am in two minds with how bright those reflections are and the whole area on the right with the bridge - I tried toning it down quite a bit already