Image Location : Milky Way over Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight.

Freshwater Bay is a secluded natural bay cut in the imposing white chalk cliffs, with stunning views out across the English Channel and along the beautiful western coastline of the Island.

This image was captured at night, using a tripod-mounted Sony A7R2 camera and a Sigma Art 24mm f/1.4 lens, which was manually focused using live view on the sea stack. 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/2.0, ISO 1600 and Daylight white balance. This is a very complicated image made up of two sets of images all without moving the camera (that is almost true but the camera was moving slightly by a iOptron SkyTracker Pro for the second set of 12 images).

The first set of 8 images was for the beach on bottom third of the frame; these images were shot at 30 seconds each. I used these 8 raw images as a smart object stack in Photoshop, to reduce noise.

The second set of 12 images was for the Milky Way; these images were shot at 30 seconds each. 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 in Photoshop. All this work was done in Adobe Bridge with all the processing and final adjustments done in Photoshop CC.