Christ Church Cathedral – The Catherine Window

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The Catherine Window was the first I photographed on Wednesday.  Sadly this could not be captured appropriately in a single image as it was in part obscured by a sanctuary lamp hanging from the ceiling.

Designed by William Morris and executed by Edward Burne-Jones in 1878, it is also referred to as the Liddell Window, this features a central light of St. Catherine that was modelled upon the then dean’s daughter Edith Liddell (sister to Alice, the inspiration for Charles Dodgson’s work Alice in Wonderland).  St. Catherine is flanked on either side by angels: to the left representing Victory and to the right representing Sorrow.

I photographed separately each of the main lights as well as the three tracery lights that feature angels playing musical instruments.

All three of the tracery lights were heavily covered in cobwebs which added significant additional editing time.

For each of the three images below, 28 images were shot at 400mm 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 1/500 s to 1.0 s.

I will tackle the more demanding main lights in a few days!

Christ Church Cathedral – The Catherine Window Pt.2

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After a brief respite to focus upon the Peer Review Presentation, I refocused upon the Christ Church Cathedral archive.  While this light is the most striking of the three from The Catherine Window, the removal of the support bars, which cover some notable fine detail, was always going to increase the post-production time.

Typically I anticipate an hour of editing time for the removal of each individual support bar, but in this case it took over six hours to remove the four bars!

Before progressing further with the remaining two lights it seems sensible to revisit the cathedral in order to compare this image (and those of the three tracery light angels), since the lighting on the day was far from ideal and for the first time ever I also had to endure internal artificial illumination.  It concerns me in particular that the skin tones for this angel are notably different to those of the tracery lights, when logic would suggest that the skin tones should be fairly constant within a single window.

To produce this image, 15 photographs were taken at 241 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 1/10 s to 1/125 s.  As with all images photographed for my research project, it was taken using the Canon EOS 1Dx Mark II.

The photograph was taken perfectly head on, but at a slight angle (vertically) which necessitated a small amount of  distortion correction.  This is always applied as the final stage of editing, but for the purpose of the animated GIF below, I corrected and cropped one of the original images as well as the image prior to the removal of the support bars.