Image Location : overlooking St Catherine’s Lighthouse on the Isle of Wight.

It was captured about 3:00am on a lovely, still cloudless night. We had climbed a hill from the car park at the end of Old Blackgang Road in Niton. This is the most southerly spot on the Island and is one of the darkest night sky places (apart from having the lighthouse that is)!

This image was captured at night, using a tripod-mounted Sony A7R2 camera and a Sigma Art 20mm f/1.4 lens, which was manually focused using live view on the lighthouse. I was using a heavy tripod with a geared head and a RF remote control to ensure no movement for the required multiple exposures. The camera was set to Manual single exposure mode at f/1.4, ISO 1600 and Daylight white balance. This is a very complicated image made up of two sets of images all without moving the camera.

The first set of 8 images was for the bottom third of the frame; these images were shot at 0.3 of a second each, the speed was selected for the brightness of the lighthouse. I used these 8 raw images as a smart object stack in Photoshop, not only to reduce noise but mainly to produce a nice spoke effect to the light beams of the lighthouse.

The second set of 12 images was for the Milky Way; these images were shot at 20 seconds each, chosen for the 20mm lens because I wanted to have the stars as points, not streaks (the 500 rule). I used these 12 raw images as a smart object stack in Photoshop with the Median filter, mainly to reduce noise and enhance the stars. There was a simple graduated layer mask on the top smart stack of images to divide these two image areas.

All this work was done in Adobe Bridge with the processing and final adjustments in Photoshop CC.