so Mr Trumpet Power and others, tell me how to expose inside a church with criteria as following
no clipped high lights, show information from the lower levels
I doubt you're sincere in asking your question, but I'll be sincere in answering it.
First, you desperately need to learn the basics of photography before you start worrying about the advanced stuff. Walk before you run and all that. And, yes, I know -- you've got 30 years of experience. But in those 30 years you still haven't learned even the first things about photography, as evidenced by your inability to set a proper exposure (f/1.4 for architecture and it's
not a bad joke)? or achieve focus. You're so obsessed about "information" in highlights and shadows, but you're completely oblivious to the fact that you don't have any information in the midtones either, so of
course you don't have any information in shadows or highlights.
And while you're learning that you also need to learn about the light. Even if you have the greatest camera imaginable, it's not going to do you a damned bit of good if you're shooting in bad light. Shoot in great light and even your iPhone is going to make good, if not great, photos. My first, most sincere response to how to shoot inside that church, and the exact same response you'd get from any successful professional photographer, especially one who specializes in architecture like this, is to fix the light. That at least in part is going to mean waiting for the right time of day and / or year and / or weather conditions for your vision -- and, of course, that also means
having such a vision and knowing what the right conditions are to achieve it. It's also very likely to include directly manipulating the light, including turning on and off selected lights in the facility as well as supplementing with your own strobes or hot lights. (And candles! Candles are great for church interiors, especially ones that already have setups for them. But you might have to wait for the right ecclesiastical season for them....)
After you've learned the basics of light as well as exposure, composition, focus, and the like such that you're able to take a decent and detailed picture just using the normal part of the camera's dynamic range, then it's time to start expanding upon it. And I think the first thing you in particular need to learn about that is that you need to let highlights be highlights and shadows be shadows. Your repeated failing, with all cameras you've demonstrated with including your oh-so-beloved D800, is that you keep trying to turn deep shadows into highlights and very bright highlights into shadows. That's never going to look anything other than really hideous, even if you have idealized perfect equipment that could do the job without any noise or clipping or other faults. Instead, what you do is take those pure-black ultra-deep shadows and place them in Zone II, where they're still pretty dark but show a bit of texture. The shadows that already fall in Zone II you can push a stop to Zone III or
maybe Zone IV, but you want to stay away from Zone V because that's where they stop being shadows and start looking really weird, unnatural, and ugly. Same thing at the other end; your goal isn't to turn that blown-out sky into midnight blue, but to turn it into a faint powder blue so that it still looks very bright but it's got enough color to it so that you can tell it was a clear day and not a cloudy one.
When you do that, you maximize the contrast in your scene; it'll have amazing amounts of "pop." And it also looks very realistic; it'll be hard to see into the extreme shadows and highlights but you'll still be able to make things out. You also leave the bulk of the useful dynamic range to your midtones, which is where the detail that people are actually interested in lives.
How you actually technically achieve that is an almost-irrelevant distraction. As should be obvious by now, pressing the shutter is the absolute most meaningless part of the whole process, so what's the problem with pressing it a few times?
But if you've fixed the light, the image is going to need minimal post-processing, and the preview on the back of the camera is going to be a very good rough draft of your final image. Maybe some shadows will be a little bit darker than in the final version, but not much. And maybe you'll need a second exposure for the view through the window, but so what?
If you
haven't fixed the light, then, again, the time you'll need to spend in the darkroom no matter what to fix it is meaningless compared to taking a second exposure. Indeed, one of the best ways of dealing with a single capture with lots of dynamic range is to develop the raw file multiple times with different exposure settings and then composite them all together as if you had taken multiple exposures in the field...so what's the problem with actually taking those multiple exposures?
And besides. Everybody with a clue always brackets shots like these,
especially in the digital world. It's so cheap and it provides so much insurance. Does it really matter if you take three shots and throw away two or if you take three shots and
use two of them?
So, there you have it. My advice to you on interior architecture photography and photography in general. I very much doubt you'll do anything with it but whine about how much better your D800 is than anything Canon ever made, but maybe somebody in the peanut gallery new to photography will take something away with it.
Cheers,
b&
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