The Port Royal bar reflected on the River Exe at night. Exeter historic quay, Exeter, Devon, England. Image MBI000910.

 The Port Royal bar reflected on the River Exe at night. Exeter historic quay, Exeter, Devon, England. image No. MBI000910. Please email me, quoting this number if you’d like to license use of this image or purchase a fine art print.

I took this pic a couple of nights ago. The last of the revellers had staggered home and the quayside was quiet.  It was warm and perfectly still, with a clear starry sky overhead.  Perfect for this type of image. So a little after midnight I pulled my gear together and climbed out of my boat’s saloon.  For a pic such as this, relying solely on distance sodium street lighting and faint starlight the iso needs to be cranked up a bit, but not so much as to make the image very noisy, and, obviously, the shutter speed way down.  Depth of field is not an issue as everything in the picture is distant, so the iris can be (and was) wide open.  I used an old 20mm prime lens, a favourite of mine.  The sodium lighting gives the pub and adjacent buildings an unearthly yellow hue.  I rather like  it this so did not atempt to change this, feeling it added to the rather surreal look.  Clearly the stars and buildings differ massively in brightness. To acheive useable exposure of both required melding two images at very different shutter speeds (four stops difference if memory serves me).  Some post processing of the starry sky was also required. The image was converted in to a grey scale image to remove colour noise, then reconverted back to an RGB image before melding.