Scottish Cathedral

Here’s another photo from our wonderful trip to Scotland in early September. This one is of St Giles’ Cathedral, in Edinburgh. I used a 10-stop neutral density filter (a Lee Big Stopper), which blocks out most of the light and makes for long exposure times, which, in turn, can capture wonderful patterns in clouds (or in water — another effect I really like). And in this 40-second exposure, it also created “ghosts” of people standing — and moving just a bit — in front of the cathedral.

I took this image from a corner of the sidewalk across from the cathedral, and with a fair number of folks out and about around me. With a long exposure, someone walking in front of the camera doesn’t affect the image — as long as they don’t linger.  So one of my strategies, during exposures, is to try hard to look like I’m not taking an image, so pedestrians don’t end up feeling like they’re wrecking my work and therefore detouring around behind me. Once I get things set up and trigger the shutter, I’ll stare off in some random direction, trying hard to look like I’m not taking a picture!  Generally, I’m successful at this, and people just go about their business, walking either in front of me, or behind me; whichever is most convenient.

I took this image with my wonderful Canon TS-E 24mm lens — a “tilt-shift” lens.  One thing that’s cool about tilt-shift lenses — which I took advantage of in this image — is they can “correct” the perspective of buildings, making the vertical lines parallel, rather than converging, as they would with a “normal” lens. (That’s the “shift” part of a tilt-shift lens. The “tilt” part gives photographers great control over an image’s depth of field.) The other cool thing about this particular lens is that it is incredibly sharp. The full-size version of this image captures an amazing level detail — particularly in cathedral’s stained glass and minutely-carved details.

I converted the image to monochrome with Nik Silvr Efex Pro 2, including “warming” the tones a bit away from straight blacks and grays toward a subtle brown, which I’m fond of.

I hope you enjoy the image!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 7th, 2013 at 10:07 pm. It is filed under black & white, long exposure, the built environment and tagged with B&W, big stopper, black and white, edinburgh, long exposure, scotland, st giles' cathedral. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.