First Presbyterian Church, Dunedin

I went to church yesterday. Not something I make a habit out of, but with most Dunedinites away on Summer vacation, business is nice and quiet. I've been meaning to pop up the road and take some new interiors of First Church for a while now, so it was a good time to go and shoot something just for myself. It was also a good opportunity to try my new Canon 8-15mm fisheye zoom.



The results speak for themselves, even though this shot has benefited from blending 3 exposures - there's a lot of shadows and highlights to deal with in the old Kirk, so I've done a little HDR tweaking. This is the full fisheye, 8mm on my full frame Canon 5DII. To be honest, I was more than reluctant about getting this lens, I'm already happy with my old 8mm Peleng, but the Canon was a technical requirement for a certain job. At about 3x the price, I expected some improvements. At f/4 it's just a little slower than the f/3.5 Peleng, but it does have AF and the ability to set the aperture on the camera - the Peleng is fully manual.  The image quality is definitely nicer and the ability to zoom out to 15mm is pretty cool too:



After fun with the fisheye, I put on my Samyang Tilt Shift lens, another fully manual beastie.  The idea was to create some large format pictures of the interior by shifting the lens and combining portrait mode pictures. Again, I added a little HD tweak.  Just for comparison, here's the single portrait orientation frame, straight out of the camera:



I love the green in the alcove behind the pulpit, the natural light effects in there really help give it some depth. HDR just helps it all pop a little.  Here's the HDR stitch, 7573x5671 pixels :



At 15mm the fisheye is funky, but the details in the stitched 24mm fixed lens shots are beautiful, although the method is not without it's own idiosyncrasies.  You still get a reasonably strong parallax or perspective distortion. That could be fixed with the shift function of the lens, but then combining the frames becomes a different exercise which I wont bore you with. Lets just enjoy the shots, eh?

The stitched view from the pulpit comes in at 7209x7369 pixels:



Although I like saturation and light, I'm not one for really lurid HDR, pushing the sliders all the way, so these are subtle exposure blends rather than full on tone mapping. I may want to use these as composite backgrounds one day, and with that in mind, I shot some frames down one of the aisles.



Of course, the big picture can only tell you so much about a place, so before left I shot some details with my workhorse lens, the Canon 24-70 2.8L.

                         

                                                       
                          

While I was doing all this I had a lovely chat with the Reverend John Sinclair who was in the Church's heritage centre. The building was designed by notable Otago Architect RA Lawson and John was able to point out many of its unique features, sturdy design and workmanship. Only a few small enhancements to some of the structure will see it exceed the current earthquake code handsomely.

So there it is.  A little shoot just for me, no other purpose than some pictures in my bank for now. In a way, creating these pictures was a meditative process not unlike prayer. Although I profess to being an atheist, a grand old church like this is a beautiful, peaceful place to spend some time reflecting on things larger than yourself - and their glory.