antonio.giacomo

What a marvellous photo! Full dynamic range, and very well composed. Also, shot at exactly the right time for the light. I would like to think that you have photographed whoever rated it at 3/3.

Regards

I shot ten frames a stop apart, but when I came to assemble them I found that I only needed four two stops apart. The result is getting on for what the eye would register, except that the colour balance also varies because the illumination is a mixture of tungsten and sunlight. However, you would only know that the stone floor in the foreground should be a cold grey if you actually stood there.

I have also tried HDR, but Exposure Fusion produces a far more natural result.

I have shot this before on 5x4 Ektachrome, but the West window

highlights had to be sacrificed for the shadow detail in the quire. Now I

have managed to reduce the 12-stop dynamic range of the scene into a

24-bit .JFIF.

It seems that Ektachrome EIR is no longer available, and there is

nothing to take its place. Why I am messing about with infrared film

at the weekends when my job is infrared imaging is a mystery.

It seems that Ektachrome EIR is no longer available, and there is

nothing to take its place.

Hi Fabiano,

Fabulous image. It makes me very queasy, because I have no head for heights these days.

The advantages with a DSLR + 10-20mm lens is that you can lock focus, exposure and colour balance, so all the images should match. Also, you could get a lot more of the sky in.

To do this sort of thing perfectly requires that the camera be rotated exactly about the optical centre of the lens to avoid parallax errors, which is not easy, especially hand-held. I do not see any join marks on the large photograph, so you have done a very good job. I made myself a zero-parallax camera mount (which allow the camera to be rotated exactly about the optical centre of the lens in both directions simultaneously), but it does not fit my current equipment.

The other problem you will encounter with a zoom lens, especially a very short one, is that they all suffer from optical distortions. Stitching software should be able to cope with this to some extent, warping the individual images "flat". However, my preferred solution is to run the raw files from the camera through DxO Optics Pro, which has modules carefully calibrated for particular camera bodies and lenses that substantially improve the resulting image.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

Regards,

Antonio Giacomo

This is a sketch for a shoot on 5x4, and the camera and post

processing has been set up for shooting on 5x4 with a well elevated

135 mm lens, using Ektachrome E100VS. However, I am not certain. If I

used a 90 mm lens, I would get far more of the roof in. Then I could

crop the result at the sides to emphasize the height of the building

(there is another photograph of the Nave in the folio, but that is

probably far too wide). What do you think?

The big problem was the East window. It was quite a few stops brighter

than the interior. Ektachrome E100VS has a much higher dynamic range

than any digital camera, so I might get away with it if I slightly

underexpose it.

The raw camera images were processed with DxO Optics Pro 5 to correct

the lens aberrations, but no other enhancement. I tried HDR on this,

but the result was very unpleasant, so I made a mask of the window

with Virtus Fluid Mask 3 from a very underexposed image, and layered

it onto the normally exposed image. I then used PTGui to emulate the

rising front of a view camera. Finally I ran it through Photoshop CS3

in L*a*b colour space to adjust the saturation and sharpness to what I

would expect from Ektachrome.

The Butter Cross, Winchester, on a very dull morning. What was amazing

was that there was no one in the High Street in front of the cross.

But that was for a brief moment. I had no time to wait for some

dramatic clouds, so I added some that I got from my garden. I have

made no attempt to warm the image up.

The monument dates from the 15th Century, but it was restored in the

19th Century, so it has been "manipulated".

Hi Rickard,

I do not know how you did this, but it is excellent. Unfortunately, I cannot give it 10+ for originality.

The answer is that I am just sketching the shot, prior to shooting on 5x4, to find out where to put the camera, which lens to fit, what filters might be needed, what exposure I might expect, etc. The answer from this shot is that the 5x4 equivalent of 18mm on the digital camera is 98mm, so a 90mm lens would be wide enough. I can expect 6s at f/11 on Ektachrome E100 VS. However, there are a few problems. Firstly, if the east window is in sunlight, it is going to be burnt out. Also, the camera should be further back to get more of the east window in. I will be repeating the sketch to see if I can get the camera position far enough back so that I can use a 135mm lens. I also need to see if a blast of flash thrown into the roof helps. Perhaps I might need some filtration to warm the flash up.

In this image, I let PTGui straighten out the whole of the camera image, but I cropped the top off because, although the projective geometry was correct, it had done too much, aesthetically. All I did was to give PTGui the verticals and horizontals, and it works out the rest.

The original is above.

Yes, it is in England, in Hampshire. The address is 1 The Close, Winchester, Hampshire, SO23 9LS, winchester-cathedral.org.uk

It is open to the public. If you are not worshipping, a donation of ?5 is suggested. I go fairly early in the morning, to avoid the tourists, and their flashes (not that they will do them much good). The Quire is very dark, even when the sun it shining. Obviously, if you are going there, you have to do so with respect. For example, I have a tripod that will neither scratch nor leave rubber marks on the floor.

Also, in this image, I have digitally removed the rope in front of the altar. I will be asking the Dean to allow me to do it physically when I reshoot with one of my view cameras. In fact, this image is just a sketch for when I do it properly with 5x4 Ektachrome.

Perspective control using PTGui (Photoshop is totally inadequate for

this degree of compensation). Next time, I will use a real camera, not

a digital toy.

I have had a very hard job in reducing an 80MByte image to the limits

of PhotoNet, and preserve the detail. I used Stoik PictureMan Pro,

which did the best job. The interpolator is called ?Augural Zooming?.

Please do not complain that the camera was not straight - it is the

Cathedral that is not straight.