Holy Cross Abbey

I didn’t get a chance to post to the blog yesterday because I was spending the day in Tipperary second-shooting a wedding with a friend of mine, John Williams.  We left Dublin early and arrived back late, narrowly avoiding a petrol crisis, and in the 16 hours in the middle had an enjoyable time capturing some lovely images of the happy couple, Aileen and Neil.

John is going to edit and process all the images we shot, but I’ve been playing around with some of the shots from my camera as they’ve been transferring and this shot of the magnificent Holy Cross Abbey, where Aileen and Neil held their ceremony, prompted me to try a pseudo-HDR type process.

A benefit of there being two photographers on the day was the chance to capture different shots simultaneously, and minimizing the risk of missing a shot, which is always in the mind of a wedding photographer.  For instance, I took this shot while we were waiting for the bride’s fashionably late arrival at the church, and while John was taking some shots of the groom’s party and the finer details of the church.

The abbey is unusual in a number of respects.  Firstly, it must have one of the longest aisles in the country, and at that it is an aisle that slopes down from the door to some steps and then runs level to the altar, and is incredibly slippy on the downhill section, adding to the fear of falling while walking along it that brides seem to always have.   Secondly, the whole abbey is sunken into the ground relative to its surroundings, as you can see in this shot, and it made it difficult to photograph it.  Ideally, some elevation would have allowed for a viewpoint which overcame this, but I wanted to get the shot quickly and so aimed for the optimal composition while staying at ground level.

The pseudo-HDR treatment, which I’ve used before, involves blending three exposures made from a single RAW file, with the exposures at -2, 0, and +2 stops relative to the shot that came from the camera.   The technique is easily applied after the fact even where it wasn’t in my mind when I took the photograph, and one thing that typically encourages me to try it in post processing is the quality of the sky in the image straight from the camera.

In this case the sky in the exposure from the camera was almost pure white, as the camera struggled to retain detail in both it and the shadows on the abbey.  Thankfully shooting in RAW format, as I always do, meant that some of that detail was still in the original file, and could be brought out by the psuedo-HDR processing.