Contact Sheets: Sagrada Familia

A photograph is more than just a documentation. It is the photographer who creates an image by working with light and composition, and also by choosing which image to show to the rest of the world. Today, we want to decompose an image of the Sagrada Familia that I took in January 2014.

This post is part of our “Contact Sheets” series. If you are not familiar with the concept, you can also head over to our first post in this series or to our review of the exhibition that inspired this regular series. In this month’s post, we will be looking at this image:

My favorite shot from our visit to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is, in fact, a HDR composition. (Olympus Pen with M.Zuiko 14-42mm)

We visited Gaudi’s church during a short trip to Barcelona in January 2014. The city was rather quiet, probably because of the gray and dull weather that didn’t entice as many tourists to visit. However, on that day, the sun came out for about half an hour just when we entered the church, bringing out the beauty of the stained glass windows and adding a soft glow to the bright arches and columns. We were struck by the beauty, and if I had been traveling with anyone else but Mr. Colors, they would probably have gotten annoyed by how long it took until I was satisfied with my pictures.

My favorite is the one above, and it is a superposition of three images, taken from the same position and with the same aperture but with different exposure times:

F3.5, 1/50 (underexposed by 0.3)

F3.5, 1/40 (automatic setting)

F3.5, 1/30 (overexposed by 0.3)

There is no image editing on these pictures apart from the obvious addition of our logo. I used a free HDR program to combine the images and chose a very subtle HDR look – or so I like to think. Of course, I took way more than three pictures. As I was particularly impressed by the airiness of the architecture, I took mostly overhead pictures, each of them with three different exposure settings. Here are three more of them, again without post processing:

Alternative picture 1, Olympus Pen, 14mm, F3.5, 1/40

Alternative picture 2, Olympus Pen, 14mm, F3.5, 1/40

Alternative picture 3, Olympus Pen, 14mm, F3.5, 1/60

Especially the last one conveys a very different feeling than the one I chose as my signature image from the Sagrada Familia, and is thus a good example of how the photographer’s choice impacts the presentation of a place or event.

Which of the seven images do you like best?

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This article was published on perelincolors.com.