Tag Archives: Chapel of St. Nicholas

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Recording and archiving stained glass

Many places of worship house magnificent treasures of art that are seen by only a few.  People can be put off the nature of the building, or in quite a number of cases, there is simply no public access.  When able to see such artwork, the lighting of the windows will not always be optimal for satisfactory viewing.  Thus stunning windows go largely unnoticed and this art form is rarely appreciated.  I have been trying to make such artwork more readily available to the public by photographing the windows, but the photography of stained glass windows is beset with difficulties:

  • Light levels within and outside the building are rarely, if ever favourable, with insufficient direct light, or constant partial shadow.
  • The height and size of the windows typically results in perspective distortion when photographing with standard lenses.
  • Stained glass windows present a dynamic range, beyond the capabilities of the best cameras: is exposure bracketing then painstaking reassembly of the window the best solution?
  • The removal of the strengthening bars requires demanding image editing with manual interpolation of the four or five ‘missing’ 1cm strips of window.  Are there better techniques for such work?
  • With the image complete, how best to present a reproduction of a window that might be 4-6m tall and backlit by natural light?

I am inclined to think that removing the main subject of a windows from its context will make it more readily appreciated by the viewer (removing dedications and decorations) – certainly this will provide a more manageable aspect ratio.  However, this does then preclude the image from being quite so useful as a historical reference or for insurance archive purposes.  Thus it would seem wasteful not to archive the entirety of a window and then crop out the ‘flesh’ for more public consumption.  This does raise an important consideration: what is the current thinking on most effective archiving of data files when the images are required as an insurance backup against catastrophic damage?

Exposure bracketing was used to produce six images of the stained glass window, to provide a full range of exposures from heavily underexposed (to reveal detail in the darker areas) through to heavily overexposed (revealing detail in the lighter areas).  From those six images, a seventh image was constructed, single segment of glass at a time, having first selected the most appropriate piece from the original images.  Considerable time was then spent remove the unsightly, horizontal metal support bars before some cosmetic ‘cleaning’ of the seventh image.  The three images below illustrate the process.

M1 Wk7: Micro Project

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Details & planning

Thank you to Dr. Gary McLeod for his challenge:

Make a contact sheet of 36 standalone photographs that explore one stained glass window.  Every photograph must be visually different enough from the rest of the images but also reveal new information about the window itself.

There are rules:

  • You are not allowed to make composite images.
  • All cropping and adjustments must be in-camera.
  • You must use a tripod for every picture.
  • All images must be made during one visit.
  • There must be no trace of the personality of the photographer.
  • You are encouraged to think of the window as an experience as well as a thing.
  • You may use digital or film for the task. If you use digital, you are not allowed to delete images as you work.
  • You are welcome to find loopholes in the rules but time may be better spent getting to know the window.

I will be exploiting one bit of semantics regarding stained glass:

  • Light: the term for the complete vertical panel of glass within the stone framework of the window.
  • Window: a complete assembly of lights.

Thus I will be tackling The East window, composed of seven separate lights, allowing for a little more variation, with the planned shots indicated below.

East Window (low res)

The East Window

The East Window (1896 Henry Holiday) is the focal point of The Chapel of St. Nicholas, Oxford. It is divided into four lights, with three smaller lights above. The main characters are William of Wykham, the founder of Winchester and New College, Oxford; St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, who brought Christianity to South England; St. Catherine, who refused to marry the Roman Emperor Maxentius and was tortured on a spiked wheel; and Erasmus, a great scholar and theologian, who visited both Oxford and Cambridge. They are known collectively as The Four Scholars.

The inscription at the bottom of the windows reads:

In Piam Memoriam Gertrude Isabella Frances Maclaren hujus scholae fundatricis mortuae Kal. Mart. MDCCCXCVI D.D. alumni et eorum parentes.

In pious memory of Gertrude Isabella Frances Maclaren, founder of this school, who died on 1st March 1896, presented by pupils and parents.

The two small figures in the roundel at the top are Eunice and her son Timothy. She seems to be teaching him out of a book; presumably she was chosen as being a good teacher and a kind mother – qualities for which Mrs Maclaren had also been noted. The angels either side of this have streamers saying, “Hear the words of the wise” and “Apply thine heart unto my knowledge”.

PDF Contact Sheet: Micro Project – East Window Contact Sheet (5.50Mb)

Reflection: Micro Project Reflection

 

M1 Wk7: Micro Project

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Reflection

I have always maintained that the photography of stained glass is beset with difficulties.  Planning can help diminish these, but with the best will in the world, diverse and unexpected problems crop up particularly when working within the confines of tight time constraints.

I estimated that the micro project would take about two hours and in the second half of the week there was just one slot into which I could squeeze the shoot: early Saturday afternoon.  Prior to this, twice I visited the chapel to experiment and plan, but I opted not to bring a tripod on either occasion.  Friday afternoon’s visit was blessed with exquisite and constant light, but sadly Saturday saw skies filled with large snow-laden clouds and variable light.

Timing was far from perfect: Throughout Saturday afternoon, the chapel was being prepared for Sunday morning’s Confirmation Service – one of the biggest services of the year.  Consequently I was constantly at the mercy of interruptions from the cleaners, the Lay Chaplain, Chapel Wardens and numerous others.  Try as had as I might to complete the 36+ photographs without any internal light, each of the many people who entered the chapel during the two hours I was photographing, opted to turn on some, or usually all of the lights, causing huge difficulties with some of the more sensitive compositions.

Preparation for Sunday’s service precluded me from using any sort of platform to raise my position and access to the East Window is limited by the proximity of the alter.

The photo shoot highlighted numerous difficulties, many of which were previously known, but the most significant being depth of field.  In order to capture a small segment of a window, I was mostly shooting at 400mm at a distance of no more than 4m, whereas in the past I have shot using a n 85mm lens at a distance of about 7m.  All the shots at the top of the window were at a significant angle, resulting in images in which it was possible to have only a small area in sharp focus (most notable in image 23): possibly not a problem, but certainly not what I would have liked.  A further undesired consequence was the foreshortening of the image: the greater the height of the area being captured, the greater the degree of vertical compression, resulting in differences between my plans and the captured image.  A large alter immediately in front of the window made macro shots impossible as I could not manoeuvre the camera closer than 2m.

DCP_5619 (low res)Through the series of photographs, I tried hard to give an indication of the subject matter, the history of the window, the opulence of the figures depicted as well as some suggestion of the condition (both good and bad) of the window.  I believe that I met all of the rules, although I am not entirely sure that I was able to portray the window as an experience.  To provide greater flexibility, I shot just over 40 photographs, experimenting with the addition of some of the structure of the stained glass.  Perhaps I should have included more images such as this, which shows one of the strengthening bars, and also illustrates well the large dynamic range.  This project illustrates well the difficulties inherent in photographing these windows.  The pale green glass in particular proving very demanding to capture appropriately.  In photographs it can look either washed out or flat and dull grey-green, when in reality it has an almost golden component.  Confirmation, were it needed, for a photograph of stained glass to be a composition of numerous differently exposed segments.

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Three dimensions?

Outside access to the Chapel of St. Nicholas windows is not easy, so I have never DCP_5730 ce lrpreviously viewed them from that perspective.  However, closer examination of one of the windows dew me to venturing outside.  It appeared that the glass was layered.  Certainly not immediately obvious, but there are sections that clearly have more than one layer of stained glass, producing a three dimensional feel that is most apparent on this tiled floor section from ‘The Lord is my refuge and fortress’.  However, trying to photograph this effect as intended, is close to impossible.  The best I could manage was to demonstrate that there is a lower layer of lead.

From the outside, such features are evident on only two of the four accessible windows, but are significantly more obvious (and more abundant DCP_5720 e lrthose windows than is apparent from the inside).  Some of the double layers are in vivid, dark coloured locations – perhaps two layers of glass are necessary to achieve the deep blues, for example (although it is worth noting that not all vivid blues areas are double-layered).

Seen in its entirety from the outside, with the benefit of some highlighting, the images below show the extent of the double-layering.  When overlaid with a mirror image of the edited window, it is clear that this feature exists only in the darker areas or vivid colour.

IMG_2823 e cut out lr  IMG_2823 e cut out (with reverse view) lr

UPDATE: November 25, 2018

Further research reveals this process to be ‘plating‘ – a stained glass technique perfected by L.C. Tiffany in the early 1900’s.  Plating is the process of layering glass, one piece over another, to create shadows, contour and add depth to compositions.

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Digital removal of support bars

Henry Holiday cartoon windowRemoving the horizontal support bars from a stained glass window image is definitely contentious.  After all, the vidimus, (the approved design of a window; an example is shown to the left) will have included these metal bars – they are very much part of the design.  However, they do mask window details and while a necessary evil, do detract from the composition of the artwork.

I have worked hard to remove the support bars from each of the windows I have edited.  It is a laborious and time-consuming process, but so far I have been successful in this work and the results are pleasing.  However, thus far this removal has for the most part been straightforward with the support bars covering comparatively plain segments of the window.  Unfortunately this is not always the case, with some windows featuring support bars which cover intricate and complicated detail.

IMG_2927 CROP lr

In the portion of window above, the removal of the support bar would be straightforward where it covers the orange/red and blue material; the stair-runner would be rather more demanding as would the basket.  However, the construction of two dove’s heads in the absence of any reference material would be unbelievably difficult.

02 - Cropped - CROPI stand by my belief that the edited images are dramatically improved following the removal of the support bars.  Thus it remains my intention to remove them when and where possible.  Perhaps my choice of stained glass window within a chapel, where choice is available, should be driven to some extent by this factor.  Where this presents  an almost 03 - Completed - The Lord is my Refuge CROPimpossible editing challenge, such as the bird basket above, then it would seem appropriate to leave the support bars in situ.  Frustratingly, I am prompted to type this having spent in excess of 10 hours thwarted by one section of support bar within an image from which I had already removed 60% of the bars!

Into the sun…

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Lack of cloud cover has been a problem

Several weeks of sunshine have been an absolute pleasure when working with children – my athletics squad have had uninterrupted track and field sessions that have resulted in a huge number of PB’s, fantastic results at their meetings and a record number qualifying to the National Championships.  Taking fifty 13-year old boys on a five-day adventure activities trip to the edge of Dartmoor was a doddle compared with the more usual cold a mizzle of the high moorland.  Sadly, it has not been very helpful where my project is concerned, but it has allowed me to consider other aspects of stained glass.

A look at the windows of the Chapel of St. Nicholas, bathed in glorious sunshine reveals a stunning richness to the colour palette. The combination of a warmer colour temperature and a more intense light give all colours a more vivid appearance, with the darker colours having greater depth and the more subtle skin tones having a healthy tan!  This made me think that I have perhaps been missing a trick in photographing stained glass windows only during bright, cloudy days.  Consequently I spent a morning photographing five of the windows.  It was not until I viewed them on a computer screen that I realised the problem with this approach: every single glass panel had an obvious shadow created by the calmes (strips of lead H shaped to hold the pieces of glass together).  While the palette is, perhaps, more attractive with the sunlight pouring through the left window, the dark shadow in the hair at the top of the head detracts from the image.

Unedited images taken in sunlight (left) and during cloud cover (right).

Waking to an overcast sky gave me the opportunity to re-shoot the windows, with the image to the right being the preferred skin tone of this particular batch of twenty image: providing a purer, perhaps more innocent face to the angel.

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Chapel of St. Nicholas – revisited

The Chapel of St. Nicholas was the starting point for my passion of stained glass windows.  Boasting thirteen beautiful windows by Henry Holiday, this jewel of Pre-Raphaelite excellence is a private chapel to which I have uninterrupted access.  A brief break in the uninterrupted sunshine of recent weeks provided me insufficient time to negotiate access at such short notice to one of the college chapels, so I took the chance to redo my very first stab at multiple exposure blending back in 2013.

I was tempted to use the same camera (Canon EOS-1D X), since I would be using the same lens (Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM) but it seemed more sensible to maintain continuity across the project by using the EOS-1D X MkII.  My original batch we shot at f/3.2, but throughout the development of this project, I have opted to shoot a f/8.0 in an effort to hit the sweet-spot of the lens as well as to ensure that every part of the window is in sharp focus.  Much care has also been taken at the editing stage in working only with uncompressed images – such attention to detail was definitely lacking in 2013:

Stained Glass

2013 (left) vs. 2018 (right)

Eighteen hours of image editing proved that my software skills have come a long way in five years and I am now more adept at removing the support bars, in addition to ensuring that subtle designs are included that I had previously omitted (the flower motif in the top section of the sword scabbard, for example).

Stained Glass

With support bars (left) vs. edited image (right)

While a blog post does no justice to the window, nor indeed the editing, the finished image reminds me why I was first drawn to these windows.

Fight the Good Fight - NEW (low res)

Fight the Good Fight (Henry Holiday, 1906) Chapel of St. Nicholas

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Correcting years of damage

I remain ambivalent with regard to unnecessary alterations to the stained glass windows, although my intentions to create stand-alone art makes me inclined to correct cracks in glass, for example.  However I wanted to see how effectively I could restore more demanding damage.

The East window of the Chapel of St. Nicholas dates back to 1896 and is the largest work by Henry Holiday in the chapel.  Above the four lights is a roundel of Eunice and her son Timothy, which has sustained quite considerable weather-related damage over the past 120+ years, which is most obvious on the skin tones and in particular the two faces – why start with something simple?!

While this remains work in progress, I am particularly pleased with the results I have achieved on Eunice’s face.

There is still a long way to go with many of the individual pieces of stained glass.  Both items of clothing above have had an initial tidy-up, but could be further improved – it is all just a matter of available time.  With me heading off on a school trip to South Africa for the next two weeks, time is short!

The roundel is flanked by angels.  Oddly, the angel on the left was in pristine condition whereas the other required extensive post production work on each skin-coloured piece of glass.  Below is the semi-complete work:

Eunice & Timothy - repaired NEW (low res)

UPDATE: August 01, 2018

Another 10+ hours of editing has produced a more complete restoration, although I am less than satisfied with the work.  Some of the damage left minimal original material with which to work, making the reproduction of accurate textures very difficult.

The format of this blog better lends itself to a cropped view of the roundel of Eunice and Timothy, so below is a before and after animated GIF:

Eunice and Timothy GIF

Eunice and Timothy (Henry Holiday, 1896) Chapel of St. Nicholas

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Plain English & the Chapel of St. Nicholas

Feedback on my initial Work in Progress Portfolio suggested  the ‘it may be worth exploring the possibility of showing details or fragments in order to communicate other aspects of their importance.’ 

While I am confident that the Plain English Campaign could host a symposium on English language and its use in art critique, I rather relished investigating this suggestion and hope that my interpretation of its meaning is true to the author.  To that end, I have investigated the finer detail of the stained glass in order to demonstrate the various associated processes – something already done in part, but perhaps overlooked, during Module 1: Three dimensions? in which I demonstrated the unexpected three-dimensional nature of parts of some of the lights, with two layers of painted glass providing greater depth as well as increased saturation to areas of the installation:

800x800 DCP_8432d

With illumination being so critical to stained glass window photography, I conducted numerous visits to the Chapel of St. Nicholas covering most lighting conditions, (overcast; partially cloudy, clear skies; morning sun; midday sun; afternoon sun and evening sun). in order to find the most opportune time to demonstrate best the macro world of stained glass.  Countless hours of lab time spent examining assorted geological samples during my graduate studies taught me that oblique illumination is typically best for revealing the rather more hidden stories.  Stained glass windows typically found on all walls of places of worship – certainly the case for the Chapel of St. Nicholas, but on a clear day, the late-afternoon/early-evening sun resulted in the most revealing illumination of the north and south aspects.

Some 140+ images later, interesting an revealing detail of the quality of the glass, nature of the painting, together with the structure of the windows became more apparent.  I rather like the images and undoubtedly, these abstract, out of context, colour panels could be displayed in their own right.

The glass clearly shows its age with impurities, inclusions and many vesicles throughout:

Fine relieving (removal of paint from the surface of the glass prior to firing) formed the final process.  In this case needlework was used:

The painting at times is far more akin to pen and ink, with precise, controlled lines often not more than 1mm thick, providing the patterns and textures:

800x800 DCP_8458

In close-up, the order of events can also be identified particularly when looking at pale washes of colour… bold lines – shading – colour – dry brush:

800x800 DCP_8451c

Beyond the glass, the quality of the metalwork is exquisite, with the calmes that hold together the pieces of glass being soldered together very cleanly and precisely:

Calmes.jpg

Creative interpretation

This micro-project also presented the opportunity to be ‘creative’ with the exquisite artwork… undoubtedly Henry Holiday will be turning in his grave.

12x12 composition (low res)

Contemporary Tiles

NEW Composition (low res)

Abstract Tiles

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Chapel of St. Nicholas

When photographing the Chapel of St. Nicholas in early July, I was undecided which light would be best to edit, so with conditions being ideal, I photographed a selection.

The completed image below strikes me as being rather dark, although as I recall, this was the case particularly in comparison with Fight the Good Fight, for example.  I have yet to take a copy to the chapel for comparison and possible re-editing.

One omission from most of the windows or lights that I edit is the inscription.  This window was given by the parents after the death of their son.

The inscription reads:

In Loving Memory of EDWARD HORACE PERCIVAL, who died at Summer Fields March 9, 1900, added 14.

The boy in the image is apparently a likeness of Edward.

St. Nicholas - Be Ye Kind One to Another (low res)

Be Ye Kind One to Another (Henry Holiday, 1901) Chapel of St. Nicholas