Location : Montmorillon, in the department of Vienne which is part of the French region Poitou-Charentes.

The old bridge across the Gartempe River, dating in part from the 15th century with the Church of Notre-Dame on the hill behind. The curious tower built on a rocky outcrop is the site of an ancient castle; the tower overlooks the town and has a large statue of the Virgin on top. Montmorillon is now classed as a 'Town of Art and History' to reflect its focus on preserving its historical heritage. This image was captured just after sunrise a couple of days before this spring’s photography workshop in France and is one of the locations we can visit.

Photographed 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 iris. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/22, ISO 100 and daylight white balance. The camera settings were chosen to have longer exposures to smooth the river and enhance the reflection (no filters are possible on this lens). I then captured a series of 10 exposures from 4 seconds all the way to 1/25th of a second in one stop increments. The RAW processing, creating and saving of the 32 bit HDRI file was all done in Photoshop CC. The HDRI TIFF was then opened and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro 5. All final adjustments were done back in Photoshop CC. However I did not like the HDR rendition of the yellow flag iris in the foreground so it has been replaced from a single image out of the same set used for the HDR.