Location : The colour changing lights on the beach side of the Hot Walls in Old Portsmouth, Hampshire. The Hot Walls are part of the fortifications of Portsmouth, and they are extensive given the city’s strategic location on the English Channel and its role as home to the Royal Navy. For this reason, Portsmouth was, by the 19th century, one of the most fortified cities in the world. As a modern port city, Portsmouth sees many ferries arrive and depart each day connecting the south coast of Britain with France, the Channel Islands and Spain. Of course, many also go back and forth to Ryde on the Isle of Wight. The light streaks on the left of the image are from an Isle of Weight car ferry that is entering Portsmouth Harbour.

It was in the evening when I captured this image using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkIII camera and a Canon TS-E 17mm f/4 L lens. I used Live View focusing at 10x on the wall quite close to me. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/22, ISO 100 and daylight white balance. I then captured a series of exposures from 8 seconds all the way to 90 seconds in half-stop increments using Bulb. The RAW processing, compositing and the final adjustments were all done in Photoshop CC. As the camera was on a tripod and not moved for the exposures, it was very easy to combine the images on layers with hand-painted layer masks. The lights and moon were captured at 8 seconds, the beach and boat trail at 90 seconds, and most of the rest at 30 seconds.

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