Echo of Darkness - a photo on Flickriver

Echo of Darkness

Southwark Cathedral is a location I've had the pleasure of visiting and photographing several times over the years, but their recent late-night photography event provided an opportunity to capture the building in a way I hadn't seen before. As the two-hour session drew to a close and the remaining staff began to lock up, I had the cathedral almost entirely to myself, with only the light from the nave overhead to illuminate the central aisle and the occasional emergency light to prevent people from stumbling. As eerie as the scene was, it was riveting to photograph.

The final image is a stitch of two tiles, both of them a blend of nine bracketed exposures combined using luminosity masks in Photoshop. It was important to me to capture the magnificent 19th-century reconstruction of the nave's original Gothic ceiling, and even with a wide-angle lens I found that keeping the vertical lines straight meant compromising on how much of the ceiling I could include, so two shots -- taking in the aisle and then the ceiling -- were merged and the perspective then corrected. Using luminosity masks, I was able to apply my brighter exposures to the shadows and emphasise the light along the aisle, as well as darker exposures that allowed me to control the highlights along the ceiling. A high ISO compensated for the narrow aperture I used to ensure the foreground seats would be in focus as well as the altar, choir and stone screen in the distance; even then, the low light meant each exposure's shutter speed was between 10 and 30 seconds, and in the time it took to bracket 18 of these the cathedral's staff had switched off the lights above the choir, plunging the eastern side of the building into darkness.

Colour-grading the image mostly involved finding the right shades of yellow and orange to convey the glow inside the cathedral while avoiding an overload of warm tones. I applied Selective Colour and Hue/Saturation adjustments with a hint of cyan and green to offset the red and magenta across the ceiling, and a mixture of Colour Balance and Gradient Map adjustments to play up the soft blue tones in the shadows, which I felt helped to emphasise the cold evening atmosphere. Inside Nik Colour Efex Pro, I targeted the Pro Contrast and Tonal Contrast filters to the aisle to bring out the texture of the panelling along the wooden floor, while lowering the midtone and shadow contrast across the colder stone walls that had initially seemed quite harsh. Finally, using the Low Key filter, I gently darkened the edges of the frame to focus viewers' attention on the dramatic light along its centre.

The final adjustment was to remove a couple of leaves which had blown into the cathedral during what had been a very windy day. Although removing these takes away part of the memory of that blustery evening, I like how the outline of several branches from a tree outside the cathedral are still visible through the window to the right of the frame, and the memory of those silhouettes dancing in the wind while I captured this scene seems like a perfect reminder of an experience that was both spooky and captivating.

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Taken on: November 22, 2017

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Camera: Nikon D810, f/9.0, 10 sec, 14mm, ISO 500 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon D810
Lens:	14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture:	f/9.0
Exposure Time:	10
Focal Length:	14mm
ISO:	500
Exposure Bias:	+8/3 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Gain Control:	Low gain up
Sharpness:	Hard
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 7.0 (Windows)
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