Location : The Château de Sarzay which is located in the village of Sarzay in the province of Berry, the Indre Department of France. Château de Sarzay is one of the chateaus of the southern Loire Valley; it has a rectangular form, flanked by 25-meter cylindrical high towers. The château was protected by two outer walls, and 38 towers. In the first period there was also a moat with three drawbridges and a 4-acre pond. Fortress Sarzay was built in the mid-fourteenth century by Lord Matthew Barbançois.

It was shortly after sunrise when I captured this image using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkIII camera and a Canon 70-200 f/4 L lens set at 135mm. I used Live View focusing at 10x on the Château. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/11, ISO 100 and daylight white balance. I then captured a series of 7 exposures from 1/8th of a second all the way to 1/500th 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 were then done back in Photoshop with the Nik Silver Efex Pro and the Nik Color Efex Pro plug-ins. This is a layered image with colour blend bleach bypass layer at 80% opacity over a monochrome film effect layer, each optimized separately from the HDRI.