As Monty Python once said …. “and now for something completely different.” About a year ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Tremont, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cleveland, to photograph the Pilgram Congressional Church with a friend/instructor Michael Steinburg (www.comphotography.com). The interior of this church is simply spectacular with the curving balcony, huge stained glass dome and a wonderful pipe organ at the front. The challenge was shooting in the available light and as you may know churches aren’t exactly known to be very bright inside. The images of the sanctuary are all HDR images. High Dynamic Range. You see the human eye/brain can see up to 11 stops of light allowing us to see detail in the highlights, as well as the shadows. A digital camera only sees about 5 stops of light. Enter HDR. Put the camera on a tripod and shoot multiple images varying the exposure by one stop for each and you have a collection of images that show everything from deep shadows to bright highlights. In the case of the image you see here, it is a combination of 7 separate images blended into one in a program called Photomatix Pro. Pretty cool! In the gallery is a photo of the whole sanctuary from the back. It is a panorama made up of 4 separate HDR images stitched together in Photoshop. Each of the 4 images is made up of 7 different images blended together to make one. do the math and you can see this one photo started life as 28 separate images!
Trying new things and shooting in new and different places is what makes photography challenging, interesting and loads of fun! Check out the other photos from the church in the gallery.