Helen Stephenson's Yorkshire Holiday Pictures - October, 2007 - East Witton

The first thing I did was to photograph the front of the church, with its imposing clock tower. I've been shooting combined raw/JPEG and was glad of this, as I processed the raw several times to pull some detail into the foreground. I did also bracket my exposures, but found that the raw file supplied more foreground detail.

Normally, stained glass is photographed during daylight hours from inside the building, but on this occasion there was a choir practice going on inside, which meant that there was light within and I set my white balance to tungsten and took some pictures of the east window from the outside.

These window panels are really meant to be viewed from the inside, and I notice that viewing from the outside, I have a left-handed scribe who would be right-handed if viewed from the inside. There isn't a great deal of writing on these panels, or I might I just flipped them all over in PhotoShop. However, this is the way I saw them, so this is the way I've decided to present them.

Daylight from the outside is a less tricky light source: I found that there was a light bulb directly behind one of the panels I was photographing, and while I was able to compensate when photographing individual panels, that part of the complete window doesn't look as good as the rest, as I could only rescue so much detail from my raw file.

Here are the larger panels from the window, photographed individually.

I could have also had floodlit church steeple pictures in Masham, where we stopped to buy a takeaway, but it was fully dark by then, and I wouldn't have got that inky blue background that I had captured at East Witton. Also, it turned out, had I stopped to photograph the church steeple, the takeaway would have been closed. We only made it in just in time to get our dinner!