Congrats John Scott
Winner
Large Print of the Year
Combined Classes
John Scott, "Saint Joseph's Church" HDR Pano
I have been going to Saint Joseph’s Church in Bristol since 1944, when my family moved into the town. Over the years, I’ve photographed more than a few weddings in the church, falling in love with the mute color tones of the interior, the graceful arch of the ceiling and the beautiful stained glass. I even did a hand held HDR (High Dynamic Range), between services on a Sunday morning last year.
At the end of the Christmas season in 2010, Eric Larson and I photographed the interior of the Immanuel Lutheran Church on West Street. We did single photos of the interior and I did a HDR. The light was mixed between sunlight coming through the the stained glass and the interior tungsten lights of the church and the photos showed this mixture. Eric submitted his photos to the church along with one or two of mine.
With this experience, I began to think about photographing Saint Joseph’s interior. In the middle of February, I talked to Father Joe, the paster of Saint Joseph’s about allowing me to photograph the interior of the church and he agreed. I got into the church on a partly cloudy day, in the morning, in the middle of the week. I setup my tripod as close to the center of the church as possible (left to right), leveling it, then set my Nikon D700 with 14-24 mm lens on it set to 14 mm. A bubble level was used to level the camera.
I used an indexing panorama tripod head and a “L” bracket to mount the camera. The index head was set to an increment of 20 degrees for my final photo was to be a 220 degree view. I determined the exposure with a light meter, set the camera to aperture mode and f8, turned off auto ISO (which I normally leave on), and set the bracketing function to 5 shots starting with 2 stop under to 2 stops over in 1 stop increments. I shot in RAW (14 bite) format. I took my first set of 5 exposures, then moved the camera and repeated this 11 times for a total of 55 exposures.
I then brought all of the photos into CS5 Bridge, stacked them in shooting groups of 5, then brought each group in turn into Photoshop (CS5). Each shooting group in turn was made into a HDR. No photo correcting was done at this point, and each HDR was saved as a TIFF file. After all the HDRs were made and saved, I opened all 11 files in Photoshop using the panorama function. My working panorama file was over 450 mgs. It took my computer at least 20 minutes to process the files. Once the files were process, I flattened the image and made any overall corrections needed, saved the file as a TIFF then closed the file.
Now, I reopened the file in Camera RAW, made it a smart object and brought it into Photoshop. I made a duplicate smart layer, which I brought back into Camera Raw, changing the exposure to darken the stained glass and then brought that layer back into Photoshop. Both of the layers were blended together using masks to produce the final print.
The process is long and at times tedious, but the final result is worth the effort. If anyone needs help with this process, you can reach me at jscott2651@att.net
Happy shooting,
John Scott