Working a location | Boulder Bank, Nelson

To reach this landmark lighthouse requires a tedious gravel bash of seven kilometres. The pounding of hardened leather boots on unstable rocks had my feet screaming blue murder. Two hours elapsed before I arrived at the 18m-high structure, looming over Nelson Haven like a sore thumb.

For an hour I scouted the vicinity, but the lovely light of late afternoon was fast fading. A gentle zephyr destroyed the reflections I was dreaming of. Near dusk, I settled on a composition, which celebrates the historic lighthouse as the hero of the shot.

To show the wide open expanse, I chose to create a panoramic stitch. This meant shooting four overlapping photos, which I fused together later in Photoshop. Here is the resulting 'stitch'...

The following morning, I shot from the same direction, but the light was totally different...

I decided to create a sunstar effect, firstly on the horizon, then against the lighthouse itself. This is merely a matter of selecting a narrow aperture such as f/16...

... and bracketing a few exposures, which I blended together in post. The tricky thing was using luminosity masking to select the foreground, which received more sharpening and exposure boosting than the sky.

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Settings: Aperture: f/11-22 | Shutter Speeds: varied | ISO: 100 | Focal length: 17mm Canon 5D MarkIII DSLR camera.

[ If camera settings are still confusing, enroll in my Discover Your DSLR course ]

Keyword: landscape photography south island nz, new zealand landscape photography