This incredible image shows Corfe Castle and Poole Bay as you've never seen it before.

A HDR composite of five different exposures of the same photograph - taken from the ridge up to Swyre Head looking over Corfe Castle -  it takes in Long Island and Round Island, Poole Quay, the Barclays tower, and Hamworthy, with Tower Park at the top of the hill in the background.

Photographer Allan Bickers, from Ringwood, the man behind the picture, stumbled across the view while on a walk he does fairly regularly.

See Allan's Flickr Page here

He said: "The walk from the entrance of the Encombe Estate just west of Kingston, Dorset up to the Swyre Head viewpoint is a bit of a favourite – from the path the views over the estate southward to St. Aldhem’s Head and westwards over to Weymouth are superb on a clear day.

"I had been taking quite a few shots of just those vistas on the walk out to the viewpoint, but on the return walk decided amble up to the dry stone wall that runs along the spine of the ridge.

"When I looked over the wall I was presented with the view in the image, with Corfe Castle dead centre and Poole Bay as a backdrop. I had no idea that the view existed before, as I had never looked over the wall before.

"Poole Bay had a fair amount of haze over it, and later when I reviewed the shot at home anything past middle distance lacked clarity, and didn’t feel it had a lot going for it initially. Giving it a bit more thought later, I wondered if I could get more detail if I used some new HDR software (Luminance) I had been toying with.

"I set about producing a set of four or five image copies at varying degrees of underexposure to merge using the software  - there was a fair amount of trial and error and when I had those prepared it was a case of getting to grips with the parameters of the new software – again, plenty of experimentation with saturation and contrast levels, but my excuse is that I didn’t want the end result to look totally unnatural as some HDR processing can.

"I’m quite pleased with the end result, if only because I proved that it is possible to get over that curse of the landscape photographer – atmospheric haze robbing the image of fine detail in the middle distance and beyond ... and I enjoyed the walk!"