Location : Bellac a commune in the Limousin region of western France. Inhabitants are known as Bellachons. It is a small town of about 5000 inhabitants with the church of Our Lady siting on the highest point in the town which overlooks the confluence of the rivers Gartempe and the Vincou. Michael Wright, who writes the Saturday Telegraph's "C'est la folie" column about rural life in the Limousin, lives in Bellac.

It was just before sunrise when I captured this image using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkIII camera and a Canon 24-105mm f/4 L lens set to 80mm. I used Live View focusing at 10x on the church. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/11, ISO 640 and daylight white balance. I then captured a series of 12 exposures from 30 seconds all the way to 1/60th of a second in one stop increments. The RAW processing, creating and saving of the HDRI was all done in Photoshop CS6. The HDRI TIFF file was then opened and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro. The final adjustments and composting was then done back in Photoshop.
You may have noticed that I have placed the moon in this image but it is about where it would have set at this hour two days previously. We were all prepared to shoot the full moon setting here at sunrise but unfortunately it was completely overcast that morning but next time…