This is from a trip a couple of months back. I’ve put this through the mill:

It’s comprised of 3 images bracketed around F11 and 1.6 seconds [14mm on my ultrawide], which I’ve then and converted to HDR black and white. It’s not a preset, just some experimentation with structure and contrast. I’ve then done a bit of dodging and burning. The original image is shot from the south of the river, and then looking across the bridge from Shad Thames. It’s not an angle that you often see, and I have to admit that it looked a bit odd from a compositional point of view, so I’ve flipped it on the vertical.

I’m getting quite a lot of mileage out of the HDR black and white conversions, something that I keep on coming back to.

Yesterday I found myself in another of England’s finest cathedrals within the space of a couple of weeks. It was the a return visit to Ely Cathedral for photography: last summer I had a major problem with my old tripod that led, via a long and torturous route, to the tripod that I should have bought in the first place.

I had some satisfactory results in full-on HDR mode, after lessons learned in Peterborough. All but the first four shots are neutral; the last two have the Gotham dial turned up to 11.

These types of interior / tripod shots can be quite labour intensive, especially when the camera is pointing either straight up or at a steep angle. Where the light is low, you have little choice but to use manual focus. Combining manual with Live Preview on 10x magnification can get very sharp results. But pointing the camera upwards means getting low enough to the ground to see the screen, which can get uncomfortable over the course of a couple of hours.

Some brief lens asides at this point. Lofting the 24-105mm to an angle of about 70 degrees or higher causes the zoom to slip, which can be quite annoying. Also, with my 10-22mm lens, I’ve found that I can get much sharper results on manual focus than I can with auto – obviously this only applies to tripod shots where you are probably going to get the tweezers out later anyway.

Towards the end of the afternoon I wasted about 20 minutes being completely bamboozled by the camera. I had bracketing on, but the camera insisted on only taking the central exposure, with the auto exposure asterisk merrily flashing away. I’m going to have to get the manual out on this one. I had turned off the timer in the drive mode briefly to take a couple of flash shots, and turning it back on – I think – fixed it, but I’m not convinced. The external light was starting to fade by this time, so the other possibility was that the camera couldn’t expose the darkest of the bracketed shots, i.e., without going above 30 seconds on F22. I lost the head to the point that I very nearly walked out of the cathedral without my flash.

And I’m not sure I would have been able to convince my wife that losing my flash would have been “my camera’s fault” :).

I was in Peterborough Cathedral yesterday, seeking sanctuary from the January sales. It’s the first time I’ve ever been and it is a fabulous building. If I can wring a little more from the pun, I have a confesssion to make. What I did know pre-visit: that it was one of the early inspirations for Ken Follett before writing Pillars of the earth, one of my reading highlights from last year. What I didn’t know: that it is the resting place of Katherine of Aragon, and formerly that of Mary Queen of Scots. Doh!

I’ve tried to take pictures of stained glass before with universally poor results – though to be fair, in unplanned visits sans tripod. I went armed yesterday, and after trying a variety of exposures, decided on a whim that it would be worth trying some bracketing. Despite the fact that the composition is awful [the picture below is a portrait crop, with enough surrounding detail to show that the stone is exposed, but the tops of the windows annoyingly absent], I’m impressed with the balance of light that the HDR managed to produce.

The three exposures are: F14 for 0.3 seconds, F6.3 for 0.6 seconds and F9 for 0.6 seconds. This is at 22mm on my ultra-wide, and ISO 100:

Stained Glass HDR

100% crop: stained class HDR

In Photmatix, I’ve set: Strength:70, Colour Saturation: 46 [i.e., defaults], Luminosity of -3.1, micro-contrast: 2.0, and finally, micro-smoothing 0.

There is a slight green cast to the stone, but this is a reflection of reality [the amount of green glass], and is present in the central exposure I bracketed around. I’ve intentionally left it in, for what it’s worth.

I’m going to have to go back now: as so often happens for me, what I consider to be the result of the day was – not quite a fluke, more of an afterthought.