Somersby Falls - Part II

The Main Waterfall - Somersby Falls, Australia

The Somersby Falls picnic area in the Brisbane Waters national park, on the central coast of New South Wales, is the starting point of a short walk along Mooney Mooney Creek. A number of decent sized waterfalls are within a ten or twenty minute walk from the picnic area. The first, and most impressive, of these is the waterfall pictured above. More images and info after the jump.

A Closeup of the main waterfall - Somersby Falls, Australia

One of the most interesting compositional elements of the main waterfall, in my opinion, is the branch which extends across the water fall from the left of the frame (shown in the image above). I think it helps convey a sense of depth in the  images of the waterfall.

A section of the lower falls - Somersby Falls, Australia

The drop of the second fall is not as big as the main waterfall but the rocks, moss and leaves make for some interesting compositions. I didn't have any ND filters on this trip and had to rely on an aperture of f22 to get  a suitable shutter speed required to capture the silky feel of flowing water. We got there quite early in the morning and fortunately the sun wasn't too harsh at the time.

The main waterfall - Somersby Falls, Australia

The wet moss and ferns growing on the rocks along the creek add a lot of colour and interest to the images of the creek. The fact that the area is very rocky allows photographers to capture interesting compositions of small sections of the falls themselves.

A section of the main waterfall - Somersby Falls, Australia

Somersby Falls is only around an hours drive on the F3 from our place in Sydney. I've been up there on three occasions already and will definitely head up there again. It's probably best to visit in late July or early August as the winter rain would ensure a decent amount of water flowing through the creek.

A section of the main waterfall - Somersby Falls, Australia

All images on this post were captured using a Canon 7D and the 24-105mm lens. The aperture was set to f22 and the ISO of 100 for all the images on this post.

More images of Somersby Falls

• http://devwijewardane.blogspot.com/2010/08/somersby-falls-part-i.html
• http://devwijewardane.blogspot.com/2009/09/somersby-falls.html

Sydney Opera House

I had been meaning to capture this image of the Opera house for a couple of weeks but, due to bad weather, I did not get around to it until this evening. This image is a 6 image stitch, created using Hugin. More information on how I captured the images, after the jump.

I noticed the great light this evening, as I stepped out of work and decided to head down to Circular Quay to capture another image of the opera house. Thanks to daylight savings, I was able to get home, grab my gear and make it down to the opera house with about 20 minutes to spare before sunset. After scouting out a location to set up the tripod, I took a few test shots and waited around twenty minutes after sunset to capture the images.

I used a 50mm lens at f10 to ensure that the lamps and the opera house were in focus. The test shots, which I took earlier, gave me an indication of the required shutter speed. From memory, the shutter speed used to capture these images was 1.6 seconds or 2 seconds. I used auto-focus and locked focus on the centre of the Opera house, then moved into manual focus and did not change focus during the entire shoot. I also used a remote shutter release to minimise camera shake.

I then used Photoshop to process the RAW files and stitched them using Hugin.

Click here to see another shot of the opera house from a different angle.

Click here for another image of the Opera House and the CBD

New England National Park

Sylvia Falls

Sunset in Sydney

Hanging Rock

North Narrabeen Tidal Pool

This is another shot from the same evening.