Coogee - Evening HDR

A few HDRs from Coogee. I finally have a little more time for photography and writing again and hopefully I will be able to do something about the backlog - it would be sad having to go into an eventful 2011 still trying to deal with 2010.


HDR is pretty perfect for capturing the last sunlight of the day and still keep some details in the shadow Unfortunately I was out at least 20 min late so the sun had already disappeared and I had to battle very slow shutter speeds. However, with a few natural camera supports around - who needs a tripod when there are solid rocks around? - it was possible to get enough light through the lens to call it a photo. Knowing how dark is was towards the end, it is quite impressive how the HDR manages to extract colors from all the darkness.

Surfs Up in Bondi - A Good Excuse For a Photowalk

Once again I teamed up with Yiing for a photowalk around Coogee. We had not really planned where to go, but with the sun shining and a generally quite fantastic day the vote took us north along the coast .. and there was something about a surf competition at Bondi.

As we got closer to Bondi we realized that the surf competition was indeed well and truly on and a few celebrity surfers had made their way to Bondi - including Kelly Slater.

Taking surf pictures is soooo rewarding and dare I say easy(?), at least compared to the struggle I normally have when trying to frame those birds - the surfers are where the waves are - simple as that! :-D Despite arriving late we probably ended up in a near perfect position up on the wall just south of the beach, where we had great views to the action on the water and the shenanigan on the beach.


Fantastic stuff! Great seeing an event like that and fun trying to shoot a very different type of pictures. However, it had taken us close to 2 hours walking to Bondi and "yes" we could probably do the return journey faster, but still it would take a while making it back to Coogee, so we decided to leave before the price ceremony.

On our way to Bondi, we had actually "practiced" taking surf pictures of a couple of surfers at Tamarama. I have included some of the pictures here, this particular day I guess the organizers would have been better off relocating the competition a beach further south, Tamarama was sporting some super good waves and the closeness of the break made it a pure joy to take pictures there.

Night Photography in Coogee

Once again I had signed up for a photowalk with Yiing, one of my Canon slinging friends. As usual there is always a surprise or two when Yiing is around :-) This time it was luckily great news .. and camera related, he had brought the Canon 50mm f/1.4! A super fast lens like that is tons of fun, the large aperture allows the photographer to take pictures that you simple cannot get with slower (cheaper) lenses.

All good! We started out by fooling around with shallow depth of field and available light shooting, but as it got really dark shutter speed slowed down and we decided to concentrate on long exposure night shooting. The secret is to have a good quality tripod, mirror lock-up option and a remote .. well, I do not have a tripod or a remote, my camera has mirror lock-up, but I cannot combine it with the timer function .. however there is quite a bit of good solid stonework around Coogee, which conveniently can be used as solid support, unfortunately, it also means that after a few nights out you end up having to take the same pictures over and over again unless the local council manages to put in some strategically well placed extra stones :-D One day I might buy a tripod .. maybe.

Good long exposure works really well with moving water, the averaging over 30 seconds (or longer) gives you this dreamy mercury look of the water, when conditions are right. This night in Coogee the waves were slightly on the large side and even cheating by retreating to the rock pool in our hunt for some steady waters was only partly successful - guess we will have to get out there another time! :-)

Big Waves In Coogee

Fantastic stuff! It is not very often the really big waves hit Coogee, indeed it is not very often that you can even claim that it is worth surfing around Coogee - the waves are simply just not good enough. This late January day, however, things were different.

[Notice the surfer to the right taking on this monster!]

I had finally decided to do what I should have done from the very beginning; put the new lens on and keep it there till I felt comfortable with it! That is how all new lenses should be treated! At work I had heard that it was looking like it would be "good" surf conditions along most of the coast, so why not take advantage and go for a little surf watching - photo walk combo.

Standing watching these gigantic waves coming in was absolutely gob smacking and when a group of 5 surfers started paddling towards them it attracted a crowd of probably up towards a few hundred people standing there watching the battle.

In about 1 hour all in all we saw one(!) single surfer actually being able to make it out to behind the point where the waves started breaking, probably ca. 500 meters from the beach. After a few minutes of resting he received an epic cheer from the crowd when aligning his board and catching one of the monsters of the day - fantastic stuff! First of all making it out there was only achieved by him - his 4 mates were still struggling in the foamy waters closer to the coast - but someone actually taking on and riding on of these waves was everything you could have hoped for as a spectator ... I would seriously have loved bringing the Bigma, but for keeping the wave in the shot I must admit the macro was probably better suited - exactly the purpose of exploring what you can do with your new lens! ;-)

After his ride, he had been pushed back probably around 100 meters and it was like the water had been infuriated by him conquering a wave and a set of 4 to 5 even larger monsters were rolling in, pushing everyone even further back - at some stage it started looking slightly dangerous since the pounding waves gave very little time for recovery. It broke the spirit of most of the surfers and as we left it looked unlikely that anyone else would be able to ride the waves.

It is weird only having 150mm - at that distance it becomes quite a significant task to "zoom with your feet". At first I was considering running home to pick up the bigma for the surfer pictures, but in reality I should probably be happier with what came out of the prime. With the zoom I would probably have made a close up of the surfer as he plunged down the slope of the wave, but would have lost the shear magnitude of the wave. Being forced to include the wave might indeed have made it a more interesting picture. :-)

Coogee in Spring - Whale and Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoo Action

Even when the weather is bad, you can find action-packed entertainment just outside your door in Coogee :-) It was one of those Sundays where a steady flow of coffee in combo with the newspaper and Landline on ABC seemed to be the very best way Sydneysiders could spend their Sunday morning, weather was poor and an irregular surf eliminated any chance of some good snorkeling.

Good telly do unfortunately not last forever and when I get very caffeinated my apartment is not big enough, so we found a break in between the showers and headed out for a quick little walk.

Excellent idea! Less than 10 minuets after putting the boots on the tally included a whale and a flock of probably 20 Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos. The YTBCs were feeding vigorously in the trees just north of Coogee beach and showed absolutely no concern towards the Dane running around below the trees frantically trying to keep details in the black feathers while not overexposing the cloudy bright sky.

Guess there are two approaches to photography: You either very carefully compose and plan your shoots and get a high keeper rate - guess that is what you do if you are skilled in photography(?) Or you do as I did: Shoot a lot(!) and hope that some come out great :-D ... I actually managed to shoot so many that a few are likely to end up on my wall one day.

While running around under the trees a very helpful lady came up and said "with such a long lens, you should nearly try to take a few pictures of the whales" How sweet is that?! :-)
Guess the lesson is to get the bum of the sofa and get out and explore. Turning to a very different topic, I have started experimenting a bit with long exposure night panoramas ... a type of photography that screams for a good solid tripod! I do not have one yet (tripod that is), but sometimes you can actually get by without. Since Coogee is mentioned in the title I will throw an attempt in here and save the price of another blog entry :-)

Storm Approaching - Rain in Coogee

Driving back from work Thursday was quite an experience. As the Magna started the decent from Randwick down towards Coogee the view was absolutely stunning. Some seriously bad weather was approaching from the sea, Dark blue clouds were building up and I could see two rainbows. At the same time the sun was setting in the East on a cloud free sky given of a warm orange color. The play of the colors ended up being quite amazing with velvet black clouds being lit by the fading sunlight.

It was all changing really fast, so as soon as I was home I grabbed the camera and ran to our roof top terrace. Getting the colors right is quite hard and if I had been home maybe 5 min before my guess is it would have been even more impressive.

Trying to capture a massive storm front approaching with a minimum focal length of 50mm in your arsenal of camera lenses makes you wonder if you bought the right setup ;-) Well, well thanks to autostitch, which is an absolute fantastic easy to use, free piece of software for making panoramas, you can actually still manage to capture a good wide view over Coogee, having nice blue sky left in the picture and tremendous rain coming in from the right.

Still I might pull the plug on a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 when the Australian dollar starts showing a bit of strength again :-) Remember to click the last picture to get a better resolution version of the panorama.

Snorkeling The Wild Waters of Gordon's Bay

Finally back in Sydney the gang was up for a bit of water sport. Excellent opportunity to test if the wetsuit would still fit or if the gnocchi meals had slimmed me down a size or two. Happy to announce that the suit was as nice and tight as ever and made swimming around in the 20 degrees hot/cold water a joy.

Snorkeling Gordon's bay during winter is very different from doing it during the 9 summer months that we are blessed with down here. It is quieter and it can be argued that the amount of light penetrating the surface is reduced. However water quality is amazing and you can easily expect double the visibility of what you get during a summer day afternoon.

As stated the quantity of wildlife seen is reduced when the water goes cold, but what you see is more exciting. We have yet to see the first Port Jackson sharks this winter, but we were very lucky to get some intimate interaction with a Giant Cuttlefish.

The usual Ludericks and a couple of rays were hanging around and even a dive school gave good views ... apart from algae attached to rocks, divers are probably the slowest moving life form in the water :-D

No doubt the Giant Cuttlefish was the highligt of the day .. only rivaled by the big breakfast consumed afterward at our new hangout on Coogee Bay Road.

Snorkeling in Gordon's bay

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