Cathedral St. Lazaire, Autun (Cote d'Or) Pilasters lighten the effect of the massive pillars

Wonderful pilasters reduce the impression of heaviness of the massive pillars. Your

comments are welcome.

 

Great to hear from all the different Romanesque aficionados!

Very good composition. You have conveyed the mood of this church perfectly (I have visited it 5 years ago). Your composition and the use of TS lens emphasize the geomethry of this architecture and show us how it is monumental and subtle at the same time. It is a pity that the windows have not any details but that is impossible to handle such contrast with a digital sensor. Maybe you should practise HDR technique (your themes are almost always static so it would be useful to make 4-5 expositions from a tripod and merge them in Photoshop using the HDR option). I would do it if I had the possibility to shoot Romanesque architecture again. I did not see any church interiors photos using HDR so you may be the first 8^D. Regards, Michal.

Michal, thanks for the commentary. I have been researching the HDR technique and am very interested in it. It would be very nice to get the increased dynamic range and there are no real limitations to the production of the exposures. Will be going to France again in May and will give it a shot. Thanks for the tip, and I'll keep in touch with the results! Meanwhile, Theo Jacobs does HDR on architecture ... http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=630124.

Quite by chance I visited your folder and saw my name, I'm indeed interested in both church architecture and HDR and invite you to take a look at my portfolio, particularly the Cloisters & Cathedrals and the HDR photography. Since HDR is a recent development I've only been able to try it out on a few nearby churches in the Netherlands and I'm very happy with the results. You may see a lot of HDR -on photonet and elsewhere- that looks very artificial and unnatural. Don't let that deter you: with good judgment you can get very natural results, which I hope my HDR folder shows. If only I could revisit all the beautiful churches I've visited years ago (as this church in Autun, where I shot this photo). Not all photos gain much by HDR though, this one of yours would have had a slightly better illuminated vault and more beautiful windows, but it's a good photo as it is already.

Theo and Michal, thanks for the discussion of HDR on architecture, it is fascinating, actually. I happen to have three 1/2 stop brackets of this Autun shot and tried the promotional version of Photomatix HDR to see how it works. I was trying here for the most natural result (one can surely do some very interesting effects). I wish that I had exposed for the windows, and would have added those in. Take a look at the image and tell me what you think. The added detail in the nave detracts from the power of the pillars, I think, but it gives me an idea of what the shot might be if composed.

Well, you can see what it does: indeed there's the added detail in the nave and just a tiny bit more detail in the glass. But it's not spectacular. Unfortunately most camera's that do have a bracket function usually have -1, 0 and +1, which is still a bit too limited. You get best results with a wide range: -2,0,+2 (or with 5 exposures: -2,-1,0,1,2, that is what I have done in most cases). That would have given more detail, especially in the windows. Exposing for the windows would indeed have been even better. You have to have a sturdy tripod for that though because you would have to fiddle with the settings without changing the position of the camera. But I think you've got an idea now of the potential of HDR, regards, Theo

 

Dennis, I must second Theo, though I do not have any practical experience with HDR but it is quite obvious that the dynamic range would be higher with wider bracketing (I plan to use HDR in different kind of shots i.e. streets at night - the walls lit by the lanterns are frequently blown out as you may see in my portfolio; I will inform you when I manage to do this). Anyway I guess that you just worked on what you have in your archives so it is interesting what you will get after your next voyage to France. Having said that I like the atmosphere of your photo - it has just enough details in the shadows for me and IMO only the windows are still not satisfactory. I have one proposition concerning HDR, I think that sturdy tripod is one thing but the cable release should help too (but I guess that we would still have to change the settings between the shots and there is always some risk of the camera movement) - Theo, what is your opinion in this matter?

 

Regards, Michal.

Actually did one experiment here at my place as an HDR test. I tested two things simultaneously. I did a three panel vertical panorama using the Canon TS 24e, bracketed at two stops. I then created three separate panoramas (approximately 7800 pixels across), then combined the panoramas in Photomatrix. Had to use a tripod, of course, and the difference in exposure makes a huge difference. In this shot, there was some wind so there is double exposure in the trees on the left, and the dog turned her head. But, there is a huge difference between this shots and the camera originals, which were grey and fairly dull compared to this HDR.

 

I always use a cable release for my panorama shots anyway, so it works fine to do it with the HDR.

 

I'm going to do some more tests soon, including searching out a church with stained glass windows. I appreciate the discussion, and am sure that I will be doing more experiments with HDR before the May trip to France.

A cable release is handy, but my camera (Konica Minolta A200) has an option to take the photo 2 seconds after you press the release button, which worked quite well. Dennis, your Cape Cod photo shows a bit of the problems you come across especially with outdoor HDR: the -seemingly unavoidable- halo. It's not so bad in your photo, only the tree on the left suffers from it, but it ruins most HDR outdoor shots, just take a look at the HDR photos here or on Flickr (there's a huge collection there of, mostly awful IMO, HDR photos). I'm always surprised that a lot of photographers seem to accept that. Another problem is that the tone-mapping process tends to narrow the dynamic range, often giving somewhat muddy skies. What worked fairly well for me is to overlay the original photo in a new layer at a certain opacity, between 20 and 50% worked well for me. This photo for instance had a terrible halo. I could only avoid that by careful masking (not so difficult because of the hard edges),I think the result is pretty natural, but it's a painstaking job.

I hope this tone-mapping process will give better results in future versions of the software.

As for combining HDR with panorama, I did that once for this cloister photo: I used 9 HDR photos in a 3x3 grid, each of them consisting of 3 exposures, so that was a total 27 photos - a personal record for sure ;-) It's not really convincing in its naturalness, but IMHO it looks quite spectacular (especially full-screen on my 1920x1200 widescreen monitor)

Theo, I had seen this before and admired it very much. Interesting that you did 27 exposures. Did you use a tilt shift to align or do it manually. Can't image how difficult that must have been to put it together. Great shot. My Canon can do the automatic as well (just hold down the button on the cable release.

 

Will be going to Boston on Thursday and will shoot Trinity Church on Copley Square. Hopefully I'll get some good HDR material. I've done a dozen or so practice shots on previously photographed material and found that even my standard 1-stop or 1/2 stop brackets can yield results ... particularly in the case of sculpture. Here is a capital in St. Pierre in Chauvigny, again 1/2-stop bracketing. I'm posting the original next to the HDR so you can see the result. My belief is that this will yield excellent results in church sculpture (later I might post something from Moissac that was able to overcome hideous backlighting problems.)

Good result. There's especially a gain in the dark right part. I see you work with Photomatix, same program I use. The thing I discovered is that the standard setting of 'strength' -80- is usually way too high. It gives spectacular, but unnatural results. Lowering this value to 40-60 gives better results IMO. The other risk is of course to make it all more beautiful than real life. In this photo I would darken the left part again, which you could do by overlaying the original photo, as I just explained. Other thing you may have noticed is the tendency to oversaturate. Again: spectacular, but not really true to life.

As for the 27 exposures photo: I assembled that with Autopano pro, which did a pretty decent job, although you can see some of the changes from photo to photo. Well, succes with your Boston trip, I'm looking forward to see the results.

... posted the Trinity Church HDR tests but I wanted to point out a wonderful shot by an amazing photographer on the site: http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=4910776

 

MG Lizi uses HDR on the church to a wonderful effect.