Posts featuring technical discussions in our work of architectural photography
PJ and I are now a mere 10 weeks from leaving for Europe and the excitement mounts as the preparations intensify. We have been diligently researching our target areas for the Romanesque gems that delight us. There are many places on the internet, both amateur and official Patrimony sites, where we glean the information. How […]
This is a technical discussion on the use of HDR in our church photography. High Dynamic Range Photography (HDR) is a post-processing method of combining multiple exposures of a shot in order to provide a more balanced image and capture more of the contrast. We have examined in detail in a previous post but today […]
A couple of years ago, PJ and I spent a holiday weekend in Providence, partly just to have a nice getaway but also to shoot at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in East Providence and Saint Peter and Saint Paul Cathedral downtown. It was, as always, a pleasure to shoot in these beautiful structures, but we […]
The Via Lucis site is a densely populated collection of over 2000 photographs, drawings, and maps, and over 350 articles, increasing at the rate of about 120 per year. Photographs are often used to illustrate specific church sites or general articles on medieval architecture, art, and history. This creates a tightly interleaved relationship of materials […]
I’m going to try here to accomplish in short form something that is almost impossible – an overview of medieval vaulting. In theory, the task should be simple, but the subject is extremely complex. It starts with the barrel vault, a continuous sequence of arches that forms a tunnel and thereby covers an enclosed space. […]
As readers of this blog know, we recently narrowly escaped a major disaster when I accidentally deleted this blog in April. A supposedly unrecoverable event was saved by the good people at WordPress. Whew. But it got me thinking, what happens if we lose our actual photographs? We have a 14 terabyte RAID 10 array […]
We’ve recently responded to readers who want to know how to locate the churches that we write about. A number of our posts are explorations of one church exclusively and we list them on our Featured Churches page. The other day I added the longitude and latitude coordinates to the page, and today, at the […]
We get requests from many photographers, both experienced and novices, who want to understand what it takes to shoot at these churches. We have provided technical explanations already – we have discussed our camera gear, the lenses that we use and our procedures on a shooting trip. We always stress the importance of preparation; to […]
After the fifth century collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, Europe was assailed by a series of invasions from Germanic tribes. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Huns, and Franks swept into what is now Italy, France, and Spain. These invasions were actually migrations of entire peoples and they settled in the conquered lands, adopting local […]
This post originated from an interesting conversation that I recently had with Robert Consoli, who has a site called Squinchpix. Robert has as passionate a dedication to documenting and archiving European archaeological and architectural sites as PJ and I have in our more narrow field of specialization, the Romanesque and Gothic churches. The conversation centered […]
