Image Location : down on the very dark beach (Alum Bay) overlooking The Needles Lighthouse and Headland on the Isle of Wight.

It was late and very quiet. Suddenly one of the HM Coastguard rescue helicopters arrives low and below the cliff from the other side. I didn’t see it coming, just heard the noise then saw the lights. After a few short minutes, the helicopter flew off again. Luckily, I was all set up and ready. In fact, I had recently finished shooting moonset over the lighthouse at The Needles and was waiting for it to be dark enough to photograph The Milky Way. The close encounter just happened between the two.

This image was captured at night, about 11:30pm using a tripod-mounted Sony A7R2 camera and a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 L lens (@300mm), which was manually focused on the lighthouse. The camera was set to Manual with a 30 second exposure at f/8, ISO 1600 and daylight white balance. The RAW processing and final adjustments were all done in Photoshop CC.