On our trip to Sydney, I had in mind that I wanted at least one opportunity to get a decent landscape shot to take back home. Every day but one was heavily overcast with little or no visible sunset so I thought my hopes were smashed. Even so, I headed down to the Darling Harbour Wharf to try to get something anyway.
I was hoping to be in position just before sunset but the ferry's were running extremely slow and I timed myself badly and ended up missing the sunset by about ten minutes. It was dismal anyway and my morale was down. I got off at the Luna Park Wharf and walked about 50 meters from it to get to a position where the Harbour Bridge and Opera House were not obstructed by the wharf.
By this time the sun had well and truly set and the scene, to my eyes, was quite dark. I set up my tripod and framed the scene. I took about ten photos with slightly varying compositions and exposure times. This exposure happened to be about two stops above what my camera was reading as correct.
I set my ISO to 100 to get the cleanest image that I could, after all, shutter speed was irrelevant as long as the scene was exposed correctly. I set my aperture to f2.8 to get the fastest shutter speed I could to begin with so that I could work from there. The shutter speed was 8 seconds. I then stopped down my aperture two stops to f5.6 to get a longer shutter speed to get the soft glassy effect on the water, and to get a slightly sharper image.
Since I stopped my lens down two stops, I needed to open up the shutter speed two stops to compensate. One stop would be 16 seconds, two stops was 32 seconds. My camera only times itself up to 30 seconds so I had to set it to bulb and count via a watch. I covered the viewfinder to stop any stray light getting through and pressed the shutter to start the exposure. When the 32 seconds were up, I pressed the shutter again to stop the exposure.
I could probably have just used the camera's timed 30 second exposure as there is very little difference between 30 and 32 seconds. The image would have been fractionally darker (about 6.5 percent) and easily adjusted afterwards. But I like to be as precise as I can.
I hope you like it! Please send in any comments or questions you have, I'd love to hear from you.
Benen
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