Sunset at St Mary's Lighthouse

After attending the West Moor camera club last night I decided it was time to take the photograph of St Mary's Lighthouse that I've been promising for a week or two. Lighting conditions were perfect and I managed to catch the golden hour (although I was disturbed by chavs for most of that time thankfully later on they must have decided to go to the local park and drink cans of 10p lager) and left me to my art. I stayed until about 01.00 because it was so peaceful and warm and obiously had to let the fish and chips settle.

I took a similar picture about a year ago and actually sold several copies of the picture so when I returned I was over the moon to see that the lighting conditions were just about perfect and the sky (you may have noticed that I like sky's) was a wonderful colour.

It was getting dark by this point so I decided to go with an HDR shot to retain as much detail as possible.

Hope you like it.

Canon EOS 40D with Sigma 24-135 F2.8/4.0 at about 28mm using three photographs. Photo 1: 13 sec ~ F25.0 ~ ISO 100 ~ +0. Photo 2: 3.2 sec ~ F25.0 ~ ISO 100 ~ -2 stops. Photo 3: 30 sec ~ F25.0 ~ ISO 100 ~ +2 stops. All taken manually and used evaluative metering.

Merged all three through Photomatix and output to Photoshop. Didn't need to alter vibrance, contrast or curves so cleaned noise using Noise Ninja, boosted contrast slightly at this point, reduced image size to 800 on longest edge and then sharpened the picture.