Ely Cathedral - How Not to Do It

 After much thought and lots of advice from various compact system users of different varieties, I decided to trade in my Sony Nex for a Fuji XT-1, partly on the quality of the images that I had seen and also the good battery life (very short battery life is the worst feature of the Sony Nex - they need to address this). Add to this the fact that  Phil and I can now share batteries, lenses. So it duly arrived and, as we were in Ely anyway, a test run in the Cathedral. Well you would have thought with all the teaching I do, I would have checked a few things - like was it on RAW - No, was the long exposure reduction OFF - No and was the colour space Adobe RGB - No. So some unrecoverable highlights, jpeg artifacts and some with too much noise reduction. But focusing works fine and pleased to see battery not showing any reduction in power after a couple of hours shooting.

Coventry Cathedral

We spent an hour or so in Coventry Cathedral on Sunday. We last visited before the construction of the University and the large square in front of the steps - a road ran along the front with the Epstein statue overlooking mainly derelict buildings. I tried to find images from then on the web and failed so will look out my images one day. I find it a very austere almost frightening space with only the Bapistry window by John Piper offering any relief to the sombre message. Even the Eagle lecture is angular and aggressive unlike the usual rounded version.

Ely Cathedral - Infrared

A few infrared images from Ely Cathedral.

Ely Cathedral in Monochrome

 I am continuing on printing for updated/new monochrome talks and enjoyed working on these images of Ely Cathedral. Mainly processed just through lightroom.

Southwark Cathedral

 It is many years since I visited Southwark Cathedral so took the opportunity while in the area on Saturday to take some interiors - all handheld. It was cloudy so the lighting was soft which suited the architecture.

Ely Cathedral

 I took my Tilt and Shift 24mm lens for an outing to Ely Cathedral yesterday with our visitors from Guernsey. The dull light helped to allow a balance of windows and interior light. These images needed no perspective correction. A tricky lens to use but helped by the live view facility on the Canon 5D as it is totally manual.

Ely Cathedral Outing

Great trip to Ely yesterday and thanks to Lionel I got on the tour up into the octogan - owe you a lunch next outing. I have just got a Canon G12 as I wanted a good compact to act as a backup on my forthcoming trip to the Swiss Alps so this was a good time to test it. It takes Raw and appears pretty grain free at the low ISOs.

It has so many bells and whistles I can't imagine anyone would use them all but the HDR did seem pretty impressive. The first picture below is in camera HDR and the second HDR from RAW images processed with Nik effects HDR software. The colours are a bit more muted with the in camera HDR but this could be sorted in processing though of course it is now a jpeg. The images below this are also in camera HDR.