I'm not usually one for doing night trips but i just fancied it for some reason. There are multiple locations around Dorset that offer dark sky conditions well away from light pollution of the major towns and are well worth exploring especially as the Perseid Meteor shower is taking place at the moment. I would have happily gone to one of these locations and shot the Dorset dark skies hoping to score a meteor or two but the forecast said there was going to be a very short window of clear skies before the cloud came in so i decided to hedge my bets and go to shoot Portland Bill instead. If it did decide to cloud over this location would still be able to give me a shot of something good and as it happened the weather forecast actually got it right for once and it did cloud over.
A lot of people take this type of shot and lay several exposures over the top of each other so they can get things sharp and in focus and image stacking does give some awesome results, but for me multiple pictures layered together can't possibly be a single picture by its very nature ?.
I tend to take single exposures with high ISO as the 5D mk III handles it really well.
With Portland Bill giving such a good spread of light as well you really can get everything on a single exposure.
Highlights of course will always be an issue when its pitch black and they are so strong so you kind of have to accept that they will blow out a little, but overall i don't think it harms the image too much. For the shooting information i used a Canon EOS 5d mk iii coupled with a Rockinon F1.4 24mm lens and the shot was taken at F2.8 with ISO 2000 for 1 second exposure time.
Anyway that was my little adventure for the weekend, i hope you like the shots.
Happy shooting.
