St James cathedralSt James cathedral in Seattle

It is a rainy or cloudy day with no sign of Sun out in the sky, but you are free this weekend and you like to go out and  see something interesting, what you can do ? Find a place to do some indoor viewing like the St James Cathedral in Seattle.  This is one thing I like about this beautiful city, I can always find something new to see, there are so many opportunities out there, indoor and outdoor depending on climate. St James cathedral is in Downtown Seattle, and it is easy to get there.  I learned about this beautiful Roman Catholic church six years after living here, it was constructed over  100 years ago, and the architecture is marvelous.  One can always appreciate the struggle with which they developed the beautiful interior, knowing that technology was not that developed at the time it was constructed.  I attended an organized tour inside the church, we can book a tour by getting the details from the web site of the church. It looks like the view from the church towards the ocean was beautiful with no buildings blocking the view at that time, but now the whole place is filled with high-rise buildings and we can hardly see the water from there. If you want to use tripod for taking photos, it is allowed when there is no service happening in the church, but you will need to get permission in advance. 

I went there two times to this place couple of years ago. Once it was on a rainy day and another time it was a sunny day, thinking that bright Sun will give me better opportunities to photograph the interior. The windows have stained glass and it is very colorful, and you can use a telephoto like 200 mm lens to get close up pictures of the beauty of the glass structures. One thing I learned is that, a cloudy or rainy day is better to get good images of the window glass, the harsh highlight of Sun light will destroy the colors, so a cloudy day is the best. You will need the widest lens available to get the interior  of the church in one image. I just had a 20mm prime, so I did not get the widest image I could possibly get. Creating a panorama is not that feasible in this kind of an environment, because the natural distortion inside the architecture will make it almost impossible to stich the images together. I used a shallow aperture in the image above to get the star effect on the light. When you have a bright light source in the frame (example :  a lamp), proper use of shallow aperture can produce star effects. The quality of the star effect depends on the lens and also the light source.  There are couple more  interesting photographic ideas regarding photographing interiors,  that is for next week.  

Exposure : 20 mm, ISO 100,  25 sec, Exposure bias +0.3, F22, Camera on tripod, wired remote to release shutter. 

Link to the picture gallery : http://www.muraleephotos.com/p1036303551

Star effect, Windows, highlights on a rainy day