26th
St. Jude Thaddeus Parrish
I recently completed a commission to photograph the interior and exterior of St. Jude Thaddeus Parrish here in Albuquerque. While the exterior images are really straight forward architectural photography work the interior was a lot more challenging. Normally you need to add significant but subtle amounts of light to balance an interior against large and important areas of windows like the stained glass in this church. The sheer size of this space meant hours of set up or taking an entirely different approach. When spaces get too large you need to just go with the light they have present but this would have left too much contrast and poor renditions of the stained glass.
In this case I choose to shoot a blended exposure using the natural light available and not add any. Using a 7 stop bracket and a non-HDR blending method enabled the stained glass and the interior to be recorded closer to the way the eye perceives the space. The Panorama of St. Jude was assembled as all my pano’s are today with PTGUI really the best software out there for the task. It handles details and verticals better than anything else I have tried. Don’t even start me on how bad Photoshop is at making panorama’s. Once the pano was created the dynamic range was processed to bring the highlights in and open the shadows. The folks at St. Jude loved the results and so I think things where successful this go round.
