mahon pool photoshoot

So I've been wanting to do a Mahon pool shoot for a while, and I noticed that it would be sunny the next couple of days so it was the perfect opportunity. I was planning to do it Friday morning, but I checked when high tide comes in and it was slightly too late on Friday, but it was perfect for Today.


So I set my alarm to wake me up at 4:30am this morning, got out of bed, put on like 3 layers of clothes and my WYD windbreaker jacket, grabbed my gear and loaded it all in the car. I took the M5 which was surprisingly busy for 5am in the morning, in any case I got the Mahon Pool just when high tide came in. It was still dark but you could just see the faintest light from the sunrise. So I didn't have much time to work with.


It was my first time there so I didn't really know what to expect, there was this really high orange street light that lit up the area, I would've preferred a white one but oh well, I experimented with a few shots at varying shutter speeds in M mode keeping a small aperture and ISO 100 throughout most of the shoot - I'll explain why in a sec. This experience made me want to get an neutral density filter so bad now...


Ok, so why those settings... There were 2 things I wanted to get with this shoot;

1. movement of water
2. the sunrise

With movement of any kind, you would need a longer shutter in order to capture action from beginning to end, thus the shutter speed was my variable. I kept the aperture small, starting from f/8 to f/22 as the day got brighter; what this does is reduce the amount of light that hits the sensor, as I wanted to capture as much movement as possible without overexposing, this was the best way to do it. I kept the ISO at 100 to reduce the sensitivity of the sensor so it wouldn't pick up as much electronic noise.

I also used bulb shutter for a few shots, the longest exposure time I took was about 70 seconds, some of which came out slightly blurry as there were really strong winds around, despite having a very sturdy tripod, it still shook slightly (though fairly seldomly).

While walking around I slipped on some algae which I didn't see and cut my knee on a rock in the process, it ripped through my jeans too! I fell with the camera and tripod too, but my Nikki only managed to get a small scratch on the side of the lens... Lucky I had the lens hood on! Otherwise I think the glass would've been scratched!

On to sunrises! The sun is the biggest source of light that we get, so it'd be pretty useless to take photos of it with a big aperture, so I had a very small aperture (f/22) and once again varied my shutter speed to get varying results. By the time I ran up the hill the sun was well and truly risen, albeit initially it was behind a bit of cloud. Getting a well lit scene I used a shutter speed of 1/6 which obviously would lead to overexposure of the sun (you can't really underexpose the sun!) but in the case of shooting sunrises, this is a desired effect. I took a few shots with a faster shutter speeds all the way up to 1/4000 to isolate the sun light to just the area around the sun, which gave it a sunset look.

A problem I had is quite a common one, everything in the foreground was underexposed due to the overpowering sunlight, you can overcome this by using your flash as a fill light, this would light up the nearby objects without having the need to REALLY overexpose the sun/sky.

So that was my shoot at the Mahon Pool. You can see all the pics up at my flickr.

What did I learn?

I learnt to wear proper boots! HA! I would like to do this again when I get that neutral density filter, and preferably a fluid head tripod too! It was annoying adjusting the legs to get close enough to being level. I had to straighten every single one of my photos in photoshop, with this shoot it wasn't a big deal, but imagine doing it for 200+ photos...

So what's next?

-Motorbike Shoot!

A mate of mine recently bought a new motorbike, he wants me to make it look pretty hahaha!

-VIVID SYDNEY!

I missed out on it last year, didn't think much of it until I saw some photos from friends... Planning to go on Saturday evening and make a night out of it, according to Google, it will be clear, though there is slight chance of rain around 10pm... I hope not...