For the last three days we have been experiencing glorious weather for this time of year. There has been little wind, the days have delivered clear blue skies and that has carried on into the evening. Overnight temperatures have been cold. It was therefore the perfect opportunity to try to shoot the winter’s sky, which was something I have longed wanted to have a go at.

In order to escape the light from the city I biked out along the Pencarrow coastline from Eastbourne out to the Pencarrow Light. I thought that the distance was around 5km but it turned out to be more like 8. I have emptied as much stuff out of my camera bag as I could and had a study tripod strapped to the side of the bag.

I should have remembered to pack to head mounted light rather than rely on my bike light.

I knew that I had to shoot at least 30 second exposures and I started with F9 at ISO 2500 and using my touch to light up the lighthouse.

From the back of the camera I was not getting very good results so I opened the aperture to F2.8. I was now seeing a lot more detail and didn’t need to use the touch. The images did have an orange tinge to them which I was disappointed with.

I should have realised that what I was seeing on the back of the camera was not what I could achieve once I got the images back into Lightroom on the computer. The exposure in most was ok, although those taken at F9 had to be adjusted by two stops. I applied noise reductions at 50 on those that included the lighthouse and this really sharpened up the image. The bit change though was in white balance. I have it set in my camera at 5500k (which is daylight). I pulled the balance down to around 3000k and I started to see the actual colours of the sky and all of a sudden what I was seeing out there started to appear in the photos.