About the Image(s)

Background: Gaztelugatxe is an islet on the coast of Basque Coast. It is connected to the mainland by a man-made bridge. On top of the island stands a hermitage Gaztelugatxeko Doniene in Basque or San Juan de Gaztelugatxe in Spanish that might date back to the 10th century. The hermitage houses votive offerings from sailors who survived shipwrecks.
If you are in the Game of Throne series, this location was used for filming scenes for season seven as Dragonstone. The church in the series became a digitally created castle on top of the islet. I was there first time 12 years ago. But I did not have much time to spend there. So I promised to myself to be back one day and this is what happened two weeks ago when I was in the area for work and took off few days for discovering the area.
This image was taken early in the morning, a time of the day I particularly love. I arrived in the area about 1 hour before the blue hour and had to go down on the steep, well track trail, in the dark (I forgot my headlamp). Luckily there was a full moon and the cell phone light was working… Once I arrived to the spot it looked good I place my tripod and just had to wait for the light showing up. I was hoping for few clouds but there were not, so decided from the beginning to have very little of the sky and focus on the island. I also used a long exposure to create some atmosphere in the water. After taken this image, I climbed the 221 steps up to the hermitage. I enjoy this alone for an hour before the crowd of tourists start to showed up.

Fuji GFX100s, Fujnon 45-100 mm f/4 at 45mm, f/4 60 sec, ISO 400. White setting was on fluorescent with some manual adjustment. Used a 10 stops ND filter (Lee).

Post process, I crop to 3:2 as usual, I then made some basic adjustments including increasing contrast, opening shadows, decreasing highlights and white. I also increased clarity and finally add some dehaze. Finally I applied a selective burning of few areas do make the image more homogeneous.