Good job Hob! Excellent composition and lighting, one ot be very proud of :)

I doubt there's much photoshopping if any on this, what we dont sometimes realise is that night time is just as colourful as day, its just that the organs in our eyes that detect brightness and shades of grey are more sensitive than those that detect colour so at night colours seem to fade. Cameras dont have this problem so its as easy to get colourful pictures at night than during the day.

People usually dont believe there's no photoshopping on this one: http://cianmcliam.smugmug.com/gallery/398534/1/19446696/Large but there is practically none at all apart from sharpening, just a long exposure and angled lights.

The most important concept to understand to get this right is that your aperature controls how bright the artficial light is on the stones, the shutter speed controls how bright the background is. Using manual mode on the camera you can limit the 'burning out' of the stones with the aperature (I usually use F8) and adjust he shutter speed around that (usually in seconds) to get a good background colour.

I hope you dont mind Hob but I had a bit of a fiddle in photoshop: auto levels, unsharp mask (amount = 20, radius = 65, threshhold = 0 is what I use to adjust contrast, better than using the slider) then unsharp mask again to sharpen (amount 160, radius 3, threshold 0). A bit of contrast and sharpening brings out the full 3D effect of this technique, try messing with these settings yourself, this only took about 20 seconds in PS.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v463/CianMcLiam/41836.jpg

Crikey!
I was at Callanish July 2004, and there was this guy methodically rigging up lights, taking pictures, late after the visitors had gone.
I was there with Summer Garland, we stopped all night in the van, looking at the stones at night. Through bleary beery eyes we watched the skilled hands of this photographer setting up his lights and capturing the stones . . .
Was this 'Ob we were watching??????

Cheers for the nice thoughts :)

>Minor photoshopping if any?
Yeah, a little bit, I can't help it, it's a compulsion, so it there was some tweaking of the levels. The original had a bit too much noise in the sky as a result of having left the shutter open for about a minute I think, probably still got the EXIF data somewhere. Exposure time wasn't more than that I'm sure. I did some with 4-5 min exposure and they looked vile, containing more noise than image. The lightsource was one of those rechargeable lamps, originally bought to try and pick out the cups on Fyfield Down last year, (so thanks to Ishmael for indirectly putting the idea into my head in the first place). Cup spotting is why I ended up at Callanish in the night, (re:http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/38383). Sadly didn't manage to get a decent pic of the possible cup.

Took it in the summer, but didn't get around to deciphering the irritating .cr2 RAW files into Pshop. It says it does RAW, which it does, but it doesn't directly import boodydotcrbloody2 files. Hmpf.