Old oak pews.

This is for you, Agnieszka, partly because you like old churches but mainly because the image reminds me of your personal style of "dark light" which I love and have found inspirational.

Another image from the sequence I took at the beginning of February in Tetbury church (St Mary's), this time of the pews. They date from when the church was rebuilt in 1781 (so about the time of the American revolution).

The pews are enclosed with low doors at either end. I'm not sure why they did that - perhaps for warmth, or to keep dogs out, or perhaps for decorum, to hide ladies legs...

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image!

[Handheld in ambient afternoon daylight.
Developed in Capture One for colour and tone, contrasting the blue shadows with the warmth remaining in the light.
Processed in Affinity Photo with Unsharp Mask sharpening.
Strengthened colours using steeper ramps on the A and B channels in LAB mode Curves, blended using Glow blend mode at about 40 opacity. It just looked nicer :)
Slight dark vignette to take down the bottom right corner.
Tried keyword auto-tagging using the Clarifai service and my DAM (iMatch)! Worked a dream...]

Tags:   nikon z 6 Nikon NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S ancient black blue carving church dark Interior light oak old pews Tetbury woodwork no person reflection shadow indoors wood shining vintage

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St Mary’s Church, Tetbury.

Most crosses in protestant churches tend to be bare, symbolic of the risen Christ. Crosses in Roman and Orthodox churches, in contrast, tend to depict the suffering of Jesus during the crucifixion. Both aspects are a necessary parts of the whole story.

For most churches, by convention, the altar is placed at the Eastern end of the building, not because of a need to face Jerusalem or anything like that (which would be curiously Eurocentric in any case!), but simply because it faces the dawn. The idea is that in the first service of the day the priest and congregation would have the reminder of the prospect of Christ’s return - the new dawn.

Not all churches and cathedrals can be built this way though because of location constraints. In a rather amusing manner, this is got around by calling the altar end of the church the liturgical East in architectural terms, whatever its geographic orientation.

At its core, Christian belief is centred on a simple substitution: Christ’s life for our deaths. So Jesus (a name that means God Saves) died on the cross in our place, and we can share his life. So that's why the cross is important to Christians and Easter the most important Christian festival. It’s more significant than Christmas even though you wouldn’t have one without the other.

I’ve always wondered why Good Friday was good, when to my mind it is the most sad and painful day in the historical narrative, commemorating as it does the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Hardly good, one would think. But the day’s name goes back a long way - the good has an old English meaning of pious or holy, so it’s good in the sense of holiest (or most set apart and distinctive, which is what holy tends to mean in a Christian context).

This image was taken at the beginning of February, one of a series of shots in this grandly beautiful town church which, incidentally, has one of the tallest spires in England.

Taking pictures inside churches is a real challenge, especially in dim light towards the end of the day as this one was. The modern consumer camera sensor, and our LCD screens for that matter, can handle about 5 EVs of brightness level (dynamic range). In contrast (excuse the pun) our eyes can accommodate about 21 EV of dynamic range, given a little time to adjust. That’s a huge disparity, especially when you consider the EV scale is logarithmic… sigh...much for the hope of photorealism :)

One approach would be to merge a series of differently exposed captures together in an HDR image. But doing that without a tripod was beyond me…

Much tweaking of Curves and brightness layers ensued. Still not ideal but I rather like the dark interior look.

So, on this Good Friday may I wish all my friends, of differing faiths and none, a happy weekend (albeit a little strange!) and God’s blessing on your lives.

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Easter! :)

[Handheld in suffuse ambient sunlight.
Developed in Capture One with careful tweaking so as not to blow out the highlights, particularly in the blues.
Selective enhancement of the window colours to counter the relatively intense backlighting.
A heavy adjustment to the keystone perspective to get the verticals vertical (the window is very tall).
Processed in Affinity with more light and colour work in Curves, and the use of a gradient mask to brighten the top.
The result was quite noisy, particularly on the dark walls, but that was fixed using Nik Dfine 2.]

Tags:   altar architecture Christianity church cross Interior stained glass Tetbury window Easter Good Friday

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Tetbury Church.

Another one in the series taken in February at one of the local market towns with its lovely church. At least this picture is the right way up and in colour. I suggest you enjoy my mood while you can...

Prayer doesn't need a place to be effective - prayer is like chatting to God and He at least is omnipresent (though not in everything which is pantheism). But some places certainly feel more conducive to prayer. Often they are peaceful or places in which people have prayed for a long time. It's one of the reasons I like churches.

In spite of its grandness and civic history Tetbury church seems one of those places for me, and I wanted to capture it in this image.

I hope you are well and that you find a place of peace and tranquility in the midst of the anxiety swirling around us. May God bless you.

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image :)

[This one was a bit complex to process... or I had a lot of fun whichever story you wish to believe in :) I'll come back later and write it up a bit more...]

Tags:   nikon z 6 Nikon NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S church God peace peaceful prayer presence spiritual Tetbury

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Tetbury church.

This is one of those ones where whichever way up it is the perspective takes a bit of working out. Blame the cameraman I guess :)

I decided to rotate it to landscape, partly because that works better with Flickr, but also to avoid the "uncertainty fail" problem where something slightly out looks a mistake rather than the creative decision which it was {cough}.

I could also pretend that changing the perspective encourages us to see the textures and patterns anew. Maybe. If I were brave...

Tetbury is an interesting little town about ten miles away. It became wealthy on the wool trade and had the unusual advantage that the townspeople managed to negotiate to buy the town from the local aristocrat who owned it. Which meant they kept the profits from the wool trade. Good move.

So the church is unusually large and splendid. This is a picture of the gallery taken from below with a lovely carved balustrade.

The name Tetbury means Tet's hill in Anglo-Saxon. Who Tet was is anyone's guess but presumably he's a distant cousin of the Egyptian Pharoah Tut. Anyway the moral of the story is if an ancient Angle approaches you and professes to be about to hill you, be alarmed :)

Oh and did I mention that Prince Charles lives in Tetbury? I usually do :) (Sorry. Old joke...)

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image! Happy Friday :)

[Taken in dim sunlight through the church windows; handheld by contortionist.
Developed in Photolab 3 emphasising the wood textures in the fore and accentuating the colours (the stonework behind was yellow against the cyan of the wood), so that I could then control the strength of the background in the B&W conversion.
Into Affinity for sharpening (not USM; High Pass/Linear blend and a touch of Clarity).
Cropped to accentuate the gallery and get rid of distractions like spotlights in the ceiling.
Converted in Silver Efex going for a low key look with a colour filter to take down the background masonry.
Toned with Orange/Teal but lightly.
Slight dark burnt (darkened) edges.]

Tags:   ancient B&W carving church dark gallery monochrome Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 old perspective split toned Tetbury wood NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S nikon z 6 100 x: The 2020 Edition 100x:2020 Image 13/100

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Happy Easter everyone :)

I know what you are thinking about this image: Peter just found a picture of a cross and superimposed it over a picture of a door…

Hmmm. Wrong (...this time anyway :) ).

This is another one from St Mary’s, Tetbury, and is as the camera found it. The cross is etched on a modern glass panel which separates the entrance vestibule from the main part of the church.

Being a bare cross, in Christian thinking it represents the reality of the resurrection, so quite appropriate for Easter. And like all the bunnies, eggs and chicks it talks of the joy of new life...

Not sure where the chocolate came from, but I'm not too concerned {gnom gnom} :)

Fear not. I shall shortly return to posting the usual strange pictures of flowers and tree trunks!

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image!

[Handheld in ambient daylight.
Developed in Capture One quite straightforwardly.
Processed in Affinity Photo, but lightly, for colour and tone.
Sharpened with Unsharp Mask.
To add interest to a rather bland photo, used a Lighting filter to add a single slightly orange spotlight from the top centre (you can see the cone of light above the door), with a slight complementary blue in the ambient light. The Lighting filter (available in Photoshop too) deserves to be better known, because it really can make a difference…]

Tags:   nikon z 6 Nikon NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S church cross etched modern Tetbury no person doorway architecture door wood indoors entrance window arch building inside religion Christian

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