Thursday, November 5, 2009

St Paul's Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral is the seat of the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne. It has been one of the places that captured my eyes immediately upon my first arrival in Melbourne. Magnificent as the exterior is, I had since wanted to have some interior shots of this one of the landmarks of Melbourne. My somewhat elusive opportunity came on Melbourne Open House 2009 day.

Along with many other public buildings, the Cathedral was open for admiration & photography on the day. Long queues were a common sight. After some half an hour waiting, I finally got a chance to step inside. The holy place was awe-inspiring.

My principal objective was to have a length-wise shot. A common practice would have been to stand at the entrance and point the camera toward the sanctuary, opposite to what I have done here. I would have liked that too, but it was a busy day. The visitor crowd was dispersed to virtually everywhere and I couldn't observe a single moment when the main aisle was relatively empty.

So I had to come to the opposite end and did the other way around. After all, that was also another length-wise shot, wasn't it? As usual, I was focal-length-limited. The widest 18mm I had wasn't enough for the angle of view I desired to capture the height. I had to resort to stitching from 4 shots. Slow shutter speed but no time for tripod and the requirement of proper alignment for stitching. All these I somehow managed by holding my breath at each time of exposure.

Location: St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, Australia
Camera: Nikon D300
Lens: Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR
ISO: 200
Exposure: 1/8s
Aperture: f/3.5
Focal Length: 18mm (4 pictures)
Filter: N/A
Flash: No
Tripod: No

4 comments:

  1. This is several shots stitched together? I'm amazed and impressed. The result is massive, humbling and beautiful... which I'm sure was the intent of the architects. Wonderful shot. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Rhett. Yes, this is a vertical panorama of 3 pictures stitched.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ဒီပံုကေလးကိုလည္းအရမ္း႒ကိုက္တယ္-

    ReplyDelete
  4. ၾကီးမားျပီး အႏုစိပ္တဲ့ အေဆာက္အဦးၾကီးေတြေအာက္ ေရာက္ရင္ တေမ့တေမာၾကီးပဲ ခံစားရတာ အက်င့္လို ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ တကယ္ အျပင္မွာျမင္ရရင္ ကိုဂ်စ္တူးပိုၾကိဳက္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။

    ReplyDelete