Location : Saint Benoît du Sault is a medieval village in the Indre department of the Centre Val de Loire region of central France. The village was built on a granite rock outcrop around the Benedictine priory and overlooks a broad lake created by a dam on the river Portefeuille. The Benedictine Priory (hence Saint Benoît) dates from the 11th Century; beside it stands the Romanesque church, which is still used. It has been designated one of about 150 “Plus Beaux Villages de France”, an accolade that seeks to protect “the outstanding heritage of these exceptional villages”. Here we look across the lake to the Priory and it is the moon light that illuminates the exterior of the building. This is almost the same image as last week but with the equivalent of just over an hours’ worth of exposure time.

This image was shot using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkIII camera and a Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5 II L lens. I used Live View focusing at 10x to focus on the Priory. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/5.6, ISO 640 and the shutter speed was 30 seconds. I then captured 120 images which took just over an hour. The images were all processed the same as a batch job in Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw and CS6. The 120 images were then blended in Startrails.exe before the final adjustments back in Photoshop CS/6.