Art of Lighting

Cathedral of Saint Paul, MN was the dream of Archbishop John Ireland who secured the site in 1904. The construction started in 1907 and went on for decades. You can see why it would have taken decades. Situated on the highest point of Saint Paul city @ Summit Hill, it stands 306ft tall with a seating capacity for nearly 3000 people.  It is a true piece of French architechture built very futuristically taking ventillation, heating, accoustics, accessibility etc into consideration.

OK. Enough with the history, lets see some photographs.

This one taken at night with an exposure of 20sec and a fisheye lens.

This one is taken from the steps at the entrance. These exterior is all granite from Saint Cloud, MN.

The Sanctuary with a 4 sec zoom out exposure.

The last one is a combination from 24 different photographs. It has 8 different angles with 3 exposures each combined to give a HDR. All these 8 HDR images are then woven together to get the 180º field of view both horrizontally and vertically. HDR is necessary here since there is electrical lighting and windows that let sunlight in at near the top that had exposures ranging from +0.5 to +1.5ev and at the vertical bottom there are dark woodden chairs which contribute to -1.0 to -2.0ev. So I had to compromise on the exposure a bit and take a +1.0ev, 0ev and -1.0ev for the HDR with Photomatix. Photoshop CS4 did the trick for stiching together the 8 different HDR tiffs.

In the film camera days, there used to be multiple exposure on single frame. Today we can expose in different frames, combine them ‘after the fact’ and finally get one picture. This technique is been popularly called “HDR” or “High Dynamic Range”.

Here is my attempt at HDR (though I should say Photoshop – even CS4 sucks at properly merging the photos. Manually merging them makes it a lot better!)

Non HDR

HDR

Non HDR

HDR

During my recent visit to India, went to Thrissur, Kerala, a beautiful city often called the cultural center of Kerala, with perfect balance between greenery & concrete and rural & urban population. During the stay at the Hotel, found this amazingly huge Cathedral. Here are 2 photographs of the same at different times of the day.

From there, the adventure began and we were travelling to Kuruva Island. It’s a beautiful set of small islands held by Tourism department. A guide walked us through a small group of 4 islands covering a 2km route.

After wading through knee deep water and trekking through tough rocks for 2km, we ended up in this big island where we found a bamboo house built to watch wildlife.

This flower is not just the symbol of a national party in India, but also the symbolizes the “progress of the soul” per Buddhism. Never mind that, but the photo opportunity was awesome.

The Banasura dam, largest earth dam in India, was amazingly wide. At the end of the dam, there was speed boating where I shot this picture.

Then the incredible Soochipara Falls. It was a trip downhill containing steps and a little bit of hike, the cascading falls was amazing.

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Muthanga wildlife sanctuary was another story. After a long ride in an open jeep through the dusty red soil, we finally were able to see some wild elephants. But the rememberable event from the ride which made us skip the next wild life santuary in the plan, was the dust which had settled all over us and my camera. I had to spend hours the day after cleaning all the equipment.