Country Church with Accidental Angel

Taken while visiting a little country church in Norfolk UK. My

daughter just happened to stand so that a ray of light was on her

hair which has overexposed as a result. I was unaware of this until I

saw the transparency. All comments welcome.

I LOVE IT!! Colin - this is wonderful. I hope that you have a poster of it made for your home!! (P.S. I need to start saving my pennies for one of those bigger cameras!) Great work!!

Thanks Lou Ann! You seem to be doing very nicely indeed with your 35mm gear. You would not be able to take a photo of a moose (just as a random example!) unless it obligingly twiddled its thumbs and waited 20 minutes while you set up your LF camera. Landscapes and buildings are fine of course and that is what I like using my LF camera for. (And it weighs 6lbs without the lens!). Medium format offers a nice compromise but needs more pennies!

Well Colin it seems you have an holy doughter in this classical picture. nice. mike

Nice picture Colin, the window and your angel are a bit competing with each other however. Your angel is more interesting but the window is larger.......

my wife thinks this aspect adds a nice xtra surreality to it!

Thanks mike and Hans and Mrs Hans. My daughter will be fascinated to hear your comments.She will probably have a chuckle about 'holy' but be relieved to hear she is smaller and more interesting than the window! I think she might agree about the surreal though. regards - Colin

Very interesting effect. You almost don't notice the female and then when you see her, she does seem surreal.

Well done! I am astounded by the amount of fine detail that is captured in this image. My first thought was that the person in the image was an artificially inserted nun, but it is interesting to read that that it is you daughter and that her hair looks the way it is because of overexposure. This is definitely an image that makes one look at it more than once.

a very nice shot. I like the unawareness of your daughter looking at the window. And the effect of the sun ray is very nice.

Kim - I had not really thought of the figure as surreal but then I suppose children are fairly real to their parents! I find it interesting how other will see things which I do not in my own shots. Brendan - this is from a 5x4 large format transparency. The area of film shown here is about 3 inches by 2.5 inches. If you compare that to the 35mm frame of 1 inch x 1.5 the reason for the detail is clear. Cristina it was not only my daughter who was unaware of things. I was surprised by how this turned out and had not even noticed she was in the frame! regards Colin

I saw, without having first read the explanation, so as not to be influenced, a white haired old lady taking a break from cleaning the pews, looking up, maybe feeling a little tired or holy...no offense. I would have shot 2 stops down, as well as this shot, to correctly expose yr daughter and the white walls, with lotsa black shadow areas for mystery, balance and contrast.

That would have been a good shot Thomas!