Rodney Campbell's Blog

I had some time to kill after work one day so I took a walk down towards central station along George St in Sydney and took some shots in two churches along the way.

The first was a modern church building – that of St Peter Julian’s Catholic Church

Grace

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 8 sec at f/9, ISO 100

and the second was a very old building – Christ Church St Laurence

View from Below

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 6 sec at f/11, ISO 100

I took this shot with the very low position available with my new Sirui tripod – this allows me to splay the legs practically horizontally and with the short centre column I can get the camera very close to the floor. The mixed lighting conditions in this church makes white balance all but impossible. I’ll have to revisit this second building during the day sometime so I can get the outside light to backlight the stained glass windows.

Week 27

No Bull

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 1/25 sec at f/9, ISO 100

Shoes

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-50.0 mm f/2.8 @ 20 mm, 1/160 sec at f/5, ISO 140

Another week, another lovely church 🙂

Continuing my theme of visiting interesting and beautiful buildings here in the city I took a trip to St James’ Church, King Street.

Completed in 1822, as part of the major construction programme initiated by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, St James’ is now the oldest existing church building in Sydney.

As with my visit to St Andrews Cathedral the people here were extremely friendly and helpful, they allowed me to take photographs all over the place and even unlocked the doors to upstairs for me so I could take some shots from up high.

As before I used my new tripod (and I’m really starting to appreciate having this new ballhead with friction control for finer more manageable micro adjustments) and shot three (or four or five) exposure bracketed sequences to later post process using HDR techniques if necessary. Like most of these buildings they are relatively dark inside but with super bright highlights where the windows are.

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay gallery viewer.

Golden Inner Sanctum

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 2 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Curve

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Sky of Diamonds

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 1.3 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Glow

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 100

Week 26 – 17-50mm

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-50.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 1/160 sec at f/5, ISO 110

This image was taken in the GPO/Westin

NIKON D7000 + 17.0-50.0 mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm, 1/60 sec at f/5, ISO 1600

Last week I had intended on christening my new Sirui N2204 carbon fibre tripod and K20x arca swiss ballhead by using it to take some images in St Andrew’s Cathedral. As it turned out it was closed that day and I ended up shooting next door at Sydney Town Hall.

Anyway I went back to try again and the people there were very nice and extremely helpful (suggesting the best time to come back when the church would be more empty (there was a police band concert about to stage a concert) and even offering to turn off the very bright lights down the central corridor so I could get some nice exposures without the lights acting like suns blowing out everything when I pointed my ultra wide angle lens up towards the ceiling). I’ve offered to send them copies of some images that they can use as they wish.

St Andrew’s Cathedral was consecrated in 1868 and major restoration work was undertaken in 1999-2000 to bring the Cathedral up to its present state of good order.

As luck would have it it was a slightly overcast day (which helps to cut down on insanely bright light coming in the many very nice stained glass windows). These are all HDR (high dynamic range) composite images, most of which using 0, -2 and +2 EV bracketed shots. The close up of the stained glass windows used five images at -4, -2, 0, +2 and +4EV because of the very wide dynamic range of the scene.

This is probably my favourite image of the set and helps convey the sense of scale inside the building

High Vault

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 6 sec at f/11, ISO 100

A very close up view of the stained glass windows at the back of the church

Stained

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 0.8 sec at f/9, ISO 100

Spiral Stairs

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 4 sec at f/9, ISO 100

The view from the main central area of the church towards the front of the church (facing George St)

Vaulted

NIKON D7000 + 8.0-16.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 8 mm, 3 sec at f/9, ISO 100