Honan Chapel

I went to college in UCC for four years, I got married on the grounds of UCC, and in the last three years I’ve been to lots of weddings.  Yet I never stepped foot inside the Honan Chapel on the grounds of the university.  Until last Saturday that is, as it is here that John and Sara decided to get married and I was a guest at the wedding.  It’s a popular venue for wedding ceremonies, and it is easy to see why – it is a lovely building.

Saturday was a very cold day, although the weather was as good as you could possible expect for a February wedding.  That would have made life easier for the official photographer on the day, as he was able to do the formal and bridal portraits outside.  While he would have had to ensure the bride wasn’t too cold, at least he would have been able to avail of the plentiful light that there was during the afternoon.

Inside the chapel was a different matter.  It is a dark building, and small also which makes it a little more difficult to move around.  In these respects it reminded me of the Unitarian Church in Dublin, although I think the Unitarian Church would have a little more light and more space for the photographer to maneouvre.  The Honan Chapel is probably a nicer building though, and the issues of light and space are obstacles that a good photographer can overcome.  On Saturday I imagine many of the photos taken by Sara and John’s official photographer during the ceremony were shot at ISO 1600 or higher, with apertures wide open at f/2.8.

My photo-taking opportunities were more limited as a guest, but as I left the church and stood waiting my turn in the greeting line I did get this grab shot of the chapel itself.  I say grab shot literally here because I really took no time to compose or expose the frame – I had a brief moment where the aisle was clear and in that second or two I quickly adjusted my aperture to f/8 to keep some depth of field, my ISO to 3200 knowing it was dark, and hoped that whatever shutter speed resulted would be hand holdable.  Three shots in continuous fire mode, and the middle one, as often happens, proved to be sharp. A 1/20s shutter speed will typically give you a one-in-three success rate, at best.

It being a grab shot is supposed to explain the fact that I didn’t centre myself in the aisle, nor did I get my camera parallel to the far wall, and so the sense of what is straight and level here is all up in the air.  Indeed in post processing, which was also a quick affair, I spent more time twiddling the straightness slider than any other setting – normally I’d go for a level floor, but here I needed to watch the window at the back of the altar too to ensure the chapel didn’t look like the leaning tower of Pisa.  As it is it’s possible that my compromise of what should be level and what shouldn’t be is not a very successful one, with everything looking a bit wonky for want of a better word.  Yes, I could import the shot into Photoshop and use the transform tool to get everything nice and square again, but I’m a believer in the time spent processing a shot not being too much more than the time spent taking it, and the (quick) processing I did in Aperture to create the result you see above has used up my post-processing budget on this one.