We are often asked about the equipment used for shooting these churches. We shoot with two Canon cameras, the 1ds Mark III and the 5D, both with full-frame sensors.
Our primary lenses are as follows:
Tilt-Shift lenses
. Canon EF TS-E 17mm f/4L (tilt-shift)
. Canon 24mm f3.5 TSE LII (tilt-shift)
We are using the new version of the 24mm tilt-shift now after years of using the earlier version.
. Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM (for shooting distant capitals and carvings)
. EF 35 f/1.4L USM
. Canon EF 24 – 105/F4.0L IS USM
. Sigma 105mm F/2.8 EX DG with a ring flash (for shooting the Vierges Romanes)
Here is a link to the post on how we use these lenses for shooting church architecture.
We use Bogen-Manfrotto tripods. Dennis uses the 3021-B-Pro tripod with the 405 Geared Head while PJ uses the lighter 190XPROB tripod and 410 Mini-Geared Head.
The equipment (except the tripods) fits nicely into a Tamrac rolling case that qualifies as airline carry-on compatible.
Post-processing and Archiving
All images are archived in, and primarily processed by, Adobe Lightroom. We also use Adobe Photoshop for work with layers, HDR, panorama stitching and a few other special processes.
Our working environment includes two Mac workstations (one has three-TB internal disk storage and the other a two-TB external hard drive in addition to the boot drives) and large 27″ Mac LED cinema displays. These are amazing monitors, as I am sure that you have heard and seen.
We store all of our image files on the Thecus N7700 Pro NAS storage server with a 14TB RAID 10 array. The backup for the computers and the other hard drives is a 5TB Western Digital ShareSpace RAID array. The computers and NAS servers are connected by gigabit ethernet. Here is a link to a post on our archiving using a Thecus NAS storage device. In addition, we do a complete cloud-based backup using Just Cloud.
Also on the network is an Epson Stylus Pro 4800 printer (thanks to Vincent Versace for this recommendation). We print with various archival inks and papers.
Finally, when we travel we use a 17″ MacBook Pro quad-core Intel Core i7 2.3GHz, with 8GB RAM. We have a collection of 1TB LaCie portable hard drives to store and backup images while on the road. We use the same file protocol so that we can simply import the entire collection when we return to the US.
Do you store your photos also on the cloud? Do you use a service such as Dropbox, for example, when traveling?
No, we don’t use the cloud for our library, although we use Dropbox regularly.
Update: As of June 2013, we are now backing up our entire library on the Cloud. This link connects to an article on our cloud-based solution.