Twilight HDR

I'm in Italy now doing a photo tour that includes Cinque Terre and Tuscany, two spectacular photogenic places in a country full of amazing photo opportunities. This is one of the five villages that comprises Cinque Terre -- Vernazza. It is most beautiful when seen from a trail that leads up a mountain, but there are only a few vantage points because the vegetation has grown a lot and that blocks most views. My photo tour group had about 20 minutes of twilight photography and then the rain came. I grabbed this shot at the peak of the Blue Hour without a tripod because I loaned mine to a tour member who didn't bring one. I rested the camera on a wooden railing and used a 5-frame HDR series of shots, in one f/stop increments, and the slowest shutter speed was 1/25. I took this with a 24-105mm lens. The lens aperture for all five shots was f/4, and the ISO was 16,000! In processing this image, I added a lot of clarity, vibrance, and saturation in ACR to make this image come to life. I finally applied Neat Image software to mitigate the noise.