ShinyPhoto

Admiring the Universe - a fine-art photographer based in Perthshire, Scotland, with interests in landscape, nature and astrophotography

Kilchurn Castle by Night

Kilchurn Castle by Night
I found this location hinted-at in a well-known landscape photographer's youtube video. Having been to Kilchurn Castle several times and made the usual photos from down on the loch shore, I was inclined to experiment with the view from a different location and found this composition set a bit further back.

I also timed it to be pitch-black night when I visited, so there was a lot of stumbling across rough grazing land trying to avoid boggy bits... but I found my own take on the scene and promptly set up some lighting of my own.

The tree on the left has a light at its base - this has the advantage of not lighting an irksome branch dangling from a closer tree in the foreground. A single LED light casts rim-lighting up the three trees on the right of the frame. Finally, to light the castle, I used a 6000-lumen LED torch from the other side of the stone wall, situated behind+left of the camera so the torch beam itself didn't show in the haze yet the castle emerges spokily from the dark beyond.

Many exposures have been combined with various aspects of the lighting in the right place. The total integration time for the frames used is 5min30s.

Exif

Camera: FUJIFILM X-H2 ISO: 640
Focal Length: 16mm (24mm-e) Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 25s

Location

GPS location: 56.40242, -5.02355