Camel Rock, Bermagui

Every day the sun comes up and when you are on the East Coast of a country you need to have a camera and tripod ready. Today I am at Camel Rock (I have yet to process yesterday's sunrise so just be patient).

Still in Bermagui with my Olympus E-P1 and Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18mm lens this sequence takes you through from pre-first light to just a couple of minutes after sunrise ...


Dawn at Camel Rock 1 by peterb666, on Flickr


Dawn at Camel Rock 2 by peterb666, on Flickr


Dawn at Camel Rock 3 by peterb666, on Flickr


Dawn at Camel Rock 4 by peterb666, on Flickr


Dawn at Camel Rock 5 by peterb666, on Flickr

 

The first two are composite pictures done using either exposure fusion (Photomatix) or HDR (Photomatix or Adobe CS5) using very subtle tone mapping. I usually try a variety of techniques and keep the best. The trick with HDR is to be restrained and get your raw processing right first.

Exposures ranged up to 120 seconds but I don't think I used that one. They would typcially be in the range of 40 seconds to 2 seconds depending on the ambient light.

The remaining ones are single exposures and nothing really special there. A slight bit of added saturation, noise reduction and lifting the highlights. Again, quite modest changes.

As the light increased, 3-stop soft grads have been intodocued, then a 4-stop ND introduced (and one of the grads removed). Exposure is 1/30 in the last shot but I have probably reduced the ND to a 2-stop or even got rid of it to get a faster shutter speed in that one.

Cheers

Peter