Wells Cathedral

I was happy to be able to visit Wells cathedral on a brief visit to Somerset last month. Whilst church architecture is not really my main interest, this beautiful cathedral offered the opportunity to try out some very low light hand-held photography on a day when, outside, the light was very poor. Hampered by having only the 24-105mm lens with me (the 1.6 crop of my camera sensor making it effectively  36-157mm approximately), it wasn’t wide enough for some of the shots. In those cases I took 2 or more shots and stitched them together afterwards.

Perspective adjustments were made during editing.

At Oldham Photographic Society, we were very fortunate to be able to view 160 historic architecture “magic lantern” slides from the Oldham PS archive a couple of weeks afterwards…a historic talk by Travis Burton, who took the slides between 1910 and 1932. We have his original script too. The slides were in excellent condition and I wonder how many of our digital images will still be available in a hundred years time, but that is another can of worms!

These are a few of my favourites from Wells:

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Exposures, made at 1600 ISO were down to 1/8 sec at f/5.6.

Here is a crop from the clock photograph, at 1:1. Given the limitations of the sensor at 1600 ISO and ensuing noise, the shot is acceptably sharp. A lifeltime of not using a tripod seems to have trained me well.