Nuffield College Chapel – West Window

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The windows of Nuffield College Chapel present a new difficulty in post-production as a result of the background clutter that influences the appearance of each light.  Following much experimentation it proved impossible to illuminate this during the photography stage and proved significantly more demanding to reduce in post-production.  In a follow-up visit it will be interesting to see whether I have managed to achieve any level of accuracy in terms of colour, saturation and lightness.

The largest of the windows lies at the liturgical east chancel (but is actually the North Window).  It depicts the five wounds of Christ and is titled Symbols of the Stigmata.

Initially, I photographed each of the three lights individually, using an 85mm lens and an aperture of f/1.8, but it transpired that the uniformity of the image was greater when photographed as a whole from a greater distance and at a smaller aperture.  To produce this image, 16 photographs were taken at 248 mm using the Canon EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens, at an aperture of f/8.0 and exposure times ranging from 1/2 s to 1/80 s.  As with all images photographed for my research project, it was taken using the Canon EOS 1Dx Mark II.

Not insignificant amounts of the top of these two lights were bleached out by the bright white clouds in the photographs, but the deep blue of this window enabled a slightly more straightforward edit in post-production.  Each of the two lights was photographed separately, so to achieve the composite view of the window above, it was necessary to take 29 photographs using the Canon EF 85 mm f/1.2L II USM lens, at an aperture of f/1.8 and exposure times ranging from 1/2 s to 1/100 s.