Architecture

Secrets found in Chester Cathedral

Patterns in the floor

Semi secret room found in the Cathedral of Chester.

When I exhibited at Chester Art Fair 2015, I got the chance to see Chester Cathedral. An amazingly beautiful cathedral built in the shape of an enormous big cross. It’s like it has more churches in one, or many chapels if you like. This pattern on the floor I think is a bit of a secret. It’s hidden behind the main altar, next the choir boy’s benches. It’s a sort of a room right in the middle of the church, but for some reason you miss it.

Before getting into the Cathedral we were standing in some of the surrounding facilities shooting on a tripod, and an elderly formally clad lady working in the church came by, and said ‘that must be important’, and I figured she was a member of the tripod police, but no, she wasn’t. She just wanted to know why I used a tripod.

I shot this photo with my Sony A6000. I really like the size of the camera, it produces photos of an amazing quality, as you can see. This is a bracketed photo shot using -2, 0 and +2 exposure compensation.

–Jacob Surland

New York Grand Central in Golden Light

New York Grand Central In Golden Light

Grand Central in New York – a must for photographers coming to New York. I didn’t have much time in New York, but I’m glad that I got the opportunity to see the Grand Central. It’s totally awesome.

About the processing

It’s a 9 shot HDR ranging from -5 to +3 with 1 EV step between each shot. My problem was, that the window in the middle has very strong sunlight coming in. So strong, that it spills over the walls and really ruins the photo. Even though I manage to capture all of the darkest and brigtest parts. In the processing in Photomatix, it turned out to be a gray and very ugly wall around the window in the middle, ruined by the sunlight. Even if the window it self is perfect. Finally I got the idea to use a ‘sunlight’ filter in one of my Photoshop plugins, to turn white grayish light golden and also reflect the golden color on the floor. That worked!

Kings Square Metro

After a barbeque evening at work, I walked slowly through the center of Copenhagen towards the Central Station. At Kings Square, next to the Danish Royal Theatre (the building on the left) is entrance to the Metro. The Copenhagen Metro is a new one, only about 10 years old. It has driverless trains and a very futuristic look. I may go down at shoot some there aswell.

About the composition

I rested the camera on the rails going down into the metro. This gives strong lead in lines from the rails. The edge of the stairwell also works as lead in lines. Above ground the buildings also works as lead in lines. There’s a lot of lead in lines in this photo.

About the processing

This is a 5 shot HDR photo, ranging from -2 to +2, with one EV step between each. Actually this is the second time I processed this photo. The first time I missed the fact that my camera had moved slightly between two shots. This was visible only in some parts of the photo if viewed at a 100%. This time I made sure, that auto-align was selected in Photomatix. This is a photo with mixed light. Electrical underground and natural evening light above ground. This gives two different white ballances. This gave me a very bluish color to everything outside of the metro. I removed a lot of the blue and cyan colors by duplicating the layer in Photoshop, pressing CTRL+U and then select the blue color. I then turned down the saturation. And then I did the same for cyan. Then I closed the dialog, added a layer mask, and then painted on the layer mask so that I mixed in what I liked from each layer. You can see details about how to blend layers in Photoshop here.

How to handle moving things

There was a lot of trafic of people going up and down the stairs, the guy with bicycle and cars and busses going by. I had fairly long exposures, so everything was kind of blurry, which looks cool with the cars. I waited until there were fewer people and then I was able to combine a complete staircase with no people, by mixing in 3 of the 5 shots. Being an HDR photos I had to adjust the exposure and look and feel of each of the photos before blending it in. If I hadn’t done that I would had light and dark patches of staircase, depending on which photo I used to blend in.

Worlds smallest skyline

Many years ago the harbour of Copenhagen was a busy area with big ships, industries, warehouses etc. Now a days as in many other big cities, the harbour has been turned into offices, hotels and living areas. This is Nordea Bank.

This is a 5 shot HDR that I took one morning on my way to work. I had hoped for a great sun set, but wasn’t rewarded with that. This is a double tone mapped image. A way you can tell is because of the more dramatic contrasts in the water. I have used the blending layer technique described in my HDR tutorial extensively on this image. The water is mostly the double tonemapped, while the buildings are mostly the single tone mapped and the sky mostly a clean image.

The sky had a strong blue color cast, that I had to remove and then I used Photofiltre Studio to extract gray colors. Something I learned from a guy in Denmark. This intensifies the colors, but it must be used with care.

The North

The North

In the heart of Copenhagen lies the Fountain of the Storck. This is from the day that iPhone 5 was released in Denmark. All around the edges of this square people where standing in line with purple umbrellas and raincoats from Telia.

About the photo itself. I have taken this with my Nikkor 14-24mm in rain at 14mm. This is very wide on a full frame camera (Nikon D800), but the objective was to make the fountain seem almost as large as the big building in the back.

Processing wise I had some really nasty areas on the photo from the raindrops and I have had a lot of pain removing them. It is an HDR based on 5 images, but it is a fairly straight forward HDR. Being 14mm photo taken upwards, I had some pretty bad tilting lines, that I have work much on to straighten up.

Desolate Central Station

Desolate Central Station
I rarely come by a central station that is as empty as this station, even at night time. I haven’t cloned anybody out or used multiple exposures to get rid of people or even waited for people to get out of the way. It just was empty – except for one single person (if you can find him).
This is a 5 shot HDR taken with a small tripod handheld on the rails of the stairs. There are way too many bicycles to get room with a real tripod. Denmark is a bicycle nation, only surpassed by Holland, I think.

Gods light strikes building

Gods light strikes buildingThis I took in Copenhagen. I had to kill half an hour in the middle of the day, and sat down by this lake in the middle of the city. I put on a 10 stop filter and a polarizer and started playing around with it. The fountains turns around ever so slowly, but with a 10 stop filter it starts doing funny things. This is an HDR made from 5 shots. My 10 stop filter has a pretty bad colorcast, so I have had to work a lot on the colors.
BTW: Never screw two filters together – these are still stuck, and I have had to buy a new 10 stop filter.

Travelling in HDR

Sydney Grand Harbour View seen from Hotel Shangri La.Sydney Grand Harbour View seen from Hotel Shangri La. Taken on the day I arrived tired to the Hotel. I’m glad that I took the photos the first night, because for various reasons none of the next three nights were as great as this night.
Sydney is a great city, that I would have loved to spend more time in.