Upde Designs

This was something I’ve wanted to do for years.  When we first moved to Dubuque in 1979 the pastor of St. Lukes (I don’t remember his name) found out that I was into photography and wanted to know if I would like to shoot the sanctuary.   He lamented that because of the vast amount of dark wood you couldn’t really represent the rich beauty of the sanctuary because flash would wash out the colors.

I’ve thought about that a long time and so about a year ago I started experimenting with HDR photography (High Dynamic Range.)  HDR simply put is taking a series of images at the correct exposure and then over and under expose other images by 2 stops.  Then you compress or composite all the images together to get the full dynamic range of luminance.

It takes some special software and a fair amount of time but over all I’m please with the image above.  I spent an hour and a half in the church and shot close to 200 images.  I’ve been working on them for most of yesterday and today.

Like any learning experience there are several things I would do differently the next time.  I didn’t set my white balance correctly, (which is okay because I was shooting in RAW format) however I had to change the white balance in each image, which added a lot of extra work.

Jeanne asked me if I had gone to the balcony to shoot the sanctuary – Nope didn’t think of that either.  I was so proud of myself for taking my time and getting the shots composed so carefully but still make a ton of mistakes and or lots of things I would do differently.

Still in the main I am pleased with my first attempt.  I could spend a whole day in the sanctuary, as there are that many things to see and that are worthy of making an image of.

I think these are pretty good representations of the actual windows, however I’m sure that some longtime members of St. Lukes will tell me no they are not.  I’m going to try it again after some more practice with the software.  I think the actual HDR photo technique with the camera is pretty close.  It is all the tweaking you have to do with the software that creates the discrepancy.

The above window is actually in the balcony.   Yes I might have gotten a little better shot from the balcony but then again  I’m happy with this image.  Up to this point I didn’t even thing of the balcony.  I was just focused on the HDR technique and camera sittings to think much outside the box.

My wife tells me that this is the only window in the sanctuary that is not Tiffany.  So for those of you who care I’ll give you the technical specifications.   I shot these images with a Nikon D700, which is a full frame camera.  I shot at ISO 100 and used a Tamron 70-200 mm F2.8 lens.  I tried to shoot (when ever possible) fully racked out to take advantage of the compression factor of the 200 mm focal length.  I auto bracketed  for 7 images at 1 stop over/under per image.  Then I used 3 images for the composite.  I tried to get images that were at least 2.0 stops above and below the right exposure.

Okay enough of that stuff.  Anyway I hope you like the images.  For more images check out my web site on Monday at Upde.Net.  Thanks for stopping by.  I love your comments (good or bad), they help me get better.