During the month of May 2011, I embarked on a number of pre-dawn photo shoots to capture the planetary conjunctions. But that’s not all I photographed. The few times I was in Sydney early before work, I also captured some of the landmarks of our famous city in a beautiful pre-dawn and dawn light.
I’ve finally finished processing them all (it’s been a busy year!) and over the coming weeks I’ll post the results of these photo shoots, in a Sydney at Dawn series.
The first in the series are 3 stunning panoramas, all captured on the 18th May 2011, all in slightly different lights as dawn fast approached.
I love astronomical interest in my landscape photography, and these are no exception. In the first shot, the keen eyed observer will spot the constellation Crux with the pointers hanging over the city, and the Full Moon blazing between the steel at the North end of the Harbour Bridge. In the third panorama, the Full Moon begs to be noticed, and can be seen setting in the West, under the Harbour Bridge.
Captured with a Canon 40D and Sigma 17-70mm lens, the images consist of 4 or 5 frames stitched together, with each frame captured as a bracketed 3-shot exposure and blended as HDR.
The HDR tonemapping was done using Photomatix Pro, and then the frames were stitched together into a panorama using AutoPano Pro. The panorama was then imported into Lightroom 3 for processing, and finally into Photoshop for final touchups.
It's worth checking out the larger versions, at 2000px wide on my blog at:
Sydney at Dawn – Triple Panorama Treat
Comments welcome.
Sydney at Dawn – Triple Panorama Treat
