I choose the Catholic Church as my interior brief. Being brought up as a catholic, the thing I remember most from an early age is being absolutely petrified of the local priest and the church in general, church was always freezing cold, dark and damp and I wanted to be anywhere on a Sunday morning than sat on a hard wooden pew, freezing cold having to put half my hard earned pocket money into a tray for the poor. Initially I wanted to portray the church as I saw it growing up, cold, damp and frightening. What changed? I spoke to the most helpful priest in the world, who bent over backwards to help me and I felt myself not wanting to portray his church in that way or maybe it was just age old catholic guilt! So the final 10 images show from my 7 year old self what the church and my faith meant to me growing up. The icons and items of everyday church life, from Mary and Jesus to baptism and confession, from collections for the poor to the splendor and richness of the church itself.
The lighting was an absolute nightmare and I shot various exposures for each photo. I didn't want to use flash as this bounced off every available surface and I lost the ambience of the church. I feel the images are composed well and I've achieved in my minds eye what I set out to achieve. I'm disappointed that some of the stain glass windows didn't show up as well but I could only achieve this on some occasions if I totally underexposed the rest of the scene and by doing this I lost a lot of the detail. A couple of images of the church itself have been deliberately under exposed to compensate for the windows.
The bible photo is a bit over exposed and isn't all quite in frame so I would use a different exposure next time and get it all in frame.
The statue of our lady I should of in hindsight used a shallow depth of field to blur out the background but the use of flash as slightly compensated for this as it's brought out her face from the background as I wanted to give her a more life like and dare I say angelic feel as opposed to a rock hard statue. The Jesus statue didn't work out as well and I'd possibly shoot from a different angle next time.
The more I photograph the more I seem to be leaning to searching out the small random details that by some would go totally unnoticed but that I find fascinating, so we have the collection for the poor sign, the organ keys, Mary and Jesus done as portraits instead of statues, the opened bible.
Still a lot to learn, but I feel I did the best I could with the lighting conditions I had and I'm quite happy with the results.
BLOGGER WON'T LET ME UPLOAD PHOTOS AT MOMENT
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