Window Light

Another taken at Winchester Cathedral

Again this was taken hand held at ISO 400. I wanted to make a kind of dramatic ethereal image of the strong window light shining in showing off the magnificent detaining in the columns, walls and ceiling of the cathedral. The centrally based wide angle view best suited the image I had I mind. I used a wide angle lens to really exaggerate the perspective and got in quite close to the columns allowing them to juts frame the three upper windows. I exposed for the upper mid tones, ensuring the highlights from the window light were totally burnt out just retaining the main verticals in each window. This also gave me enough head room in the raw file to extract some meaningful data from the shadows of the ceilings.

I processed in CS2 with a very warm white balance (32000k) as thi provided me with the most detail in and also least flare in the blue channel around the windows. Once in Photoshop I used channel mixer and curves adjustment layers to convert to mono. I used different channel mixer and curves layers for the central area defined by the arch, processing this part for high contrast and good definition of detail in the walls. In the rest of the image my processing was aimed at lightening the dark tones and shadows and pushing the contrast here to the maximum level before image quality started to tail off. I also dodged and burned around some ceiling details and the columns from the lower corners of the frame. Finally I added a little grain a sepia toned hue saturation adjustment layer.

Exposure 1/30sec at F6.3 and 14mm Focal Length
Hope you like this one, comments would be much appreciated.
Ben

Camera:	EOS 20D
Lens:	Sigma 12-24EX
Recording media:	RAW iso400

Title:	Window Light
Username:	ghibby
Uploaded:	14 May 2007 - 12:35 PM
Tags:	Architecture, Black & white, Digitally manipulated, Historic buildings, Sepia, Winchester cathedral
VS Mode Rating	Unrated These stats show the percentage of wins and the rating score that your photo has achieved. You can go to the VS Mode by clicking on this icon. Signup to e2 Signup to e2 to see which photo this has won or lost against in the vs mode
Votes:	9