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” :).