Andy Gock

There were some pretty dark clouds yesterday evening on the harbour with a little light rain pouring down. But it made for some interesting photos towards the light.

The following shot was made with a 5D Mark II and  17-40 f/4L lens at f/8 with a ND400 filter. Initially adjusted in Lightroom 2 and further edited in Photoshop CS3. The exposure for the water was 2.5 minutes, and a separate exposure blended in for the sky.

It wasn’t a straight linear gradient blend as i wanted to keep the cloud movement from the long exposure. The only portion of the scene that needed the shorter exposure is the little bright section where the sun is setting, so that is the only part that was blended in from the shorter exposure.

Some colour adjustment was performed also, to give it a little blue colour cast (which it really was blue-ish when i was there).

There was a little drizzle of rain at the time, and while taking long exposures like this, you just have to cross your fingers that the rain doesn’t fall down any heavier while you’re still exposing. Luckily for me, about 30 seconds after i finished the 2.5 minute exposure, the rain started to come down pretty heavy, but my gear was all away safe in the car by then!

Until next time…

Welcome to my first tutorial. Today we will be talking about multiple exposure blending. We will be blending multiple exposure to capture more dynamic range in a scene. This technique is more suited towards landscapes, such as those with sky and water/land structures in them where the scene is bright on one section (e.g up high in the sky) then gradually darker to the other (e.g bottom end of image).

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I headed down to the Squids Ink jetty for tonight’s sunset. There was a few members from a local Flickr group having a little meet up down there for a bit of sunset action.

It wasn’t a bad sunset at all, some nice clouds in the sky and the colours were okay. I’ve seen better colours there but I’m happy with the shots i got out of tonight. I even remembered to bring the batteries for my camera today.

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I had a wander down to Merewether Baths tonight to shoot some landscapes. Even though i have shot this area a few times in the past, i was looking for something different.

Now here is a funny story (or not so funny), i usually take two cameras with me when shooting landscapes, a 5D Mark II and a 1Ds. Today i left in such a hurry that i left my 5D Mark II battery on the charger, i.e left home without it.  Such is the case, i was forced to use the 1Ds. It isn’t a bad camera at all, but it isn’t all that great for long exposures, say over 20s since it generates a *lot* of noise. Dark frame subtraction (or in camera noise reduction) works pretty well to reduce it, but i had to disable it since it was taking too long. It does matter when you are taking exposures of over 2 mins at times.

Anyway, i was armed with a ND400 filter i only purchased recently and i wanted to have a play around with, and i was able to grab a few nice shots. A fair bit of post processing was required to remove the noise, but i think it was worth it. Obviously it would have been nicer to have the 5D II working, but hey it ain’t so bad really.

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I’m still here! I made this blog a while ago, but uncertain about its future.

Its new, i was thinking perhaps i could write and share some behind the scenes articles on photography and maybe some tutorials.

I’ve never gotten into the blogging thing (though i do read other peoples’ blogs and have learned a lot, i thought why not share some knowledge to those that might be interested).

I’d love to hear from people i know who somehow stumbled upon this, if you are reading i’d love to know how you found this site, what you might like to see, if you like it, or if it is just a plain stupid idea. Just leave a reply on this post if you like.