About the Image(s)

Nikon D850 80-200 f2.8 lens, @86mm, ISO2500, f2.8, 0.6 seconds, tripod with remote shutter release.
This is the Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse on the Atlantic coast of South Florida. My brother-in-law asked me to send him a picture of a lighthouse, just because he wanted to see one. Rather than pull on out of the files I decided to take a drive to a nearby lighthouse that I have not visited for several years. I went with the intent of capturing the light beams glowing in the night sky. The night I chose was moderately cloudy and that was the reason I chose it. I knew the beams of light would bounce around on the clouds and create a bit of extra interest in the sky. The challenge was to get the correct shutter speed and f stop. Wide apertures f2.8, f4 produce wide rays of light. Additionally, the length of the shutter speed will impact the number of lights rays that will be visible in a single shot. After a lot of experimenting. I settled on the settings above. I used a burst of 7 shots to get this shot. Shooting in burst mode guaranteed a small gap between each light ray. The trick was to get one light ray for the center to be truly vertical. It only took three rotations of the beacon before I got the central ray like I wanted. There was a lot of ambient light in the area that the high ISO picked up. This is due to a series of highrise condos that are along both sides of the inlet where the lighthouse stands. The condo grounds are brightly lit for security and the high ISO sucked up that light really fast . If you think you see halos around the palm trees, what you see is not a halo. The tips of the palms are actually a light beige. The image was processed in Lightroom and I tried out the new Landscape masks. If you have not tried them as yet, you should give them a try they are really pretty good. Five total images were stacked and blended in Photoshop to produce the posted image.