I’ve seen this unique church entrance just about every day for the last two years, and I keep promising myself that I will photograph it. It was not until today, as I was returning from an awesome full day of Urban Exploration (URBEX) with Luis dos Santos, a Berlin-based URBEX photographer extraordinaire, that I finally made good on that promise. At first, I had intended to shoot this with my 16mm fisheye lens, so I could get really close and further exaggerate the lines of this entry way. Problem was that the fisheye lens, aimed up at this entrance as it had to be to capture the scene, was straightening the lines of the columns of the entrance, which just would not do. I wanted you too see it the way I see it, and that meant… you guessed it: a tilt-shift lens, one of the best tools in my arsenal when it comes to creating panoramas, vertical (as in this case) or horizontal. It was the only way I could capture this entrance in all its glory, which I did by shooting two sets of brackets (one set to capture the bottom half of the shot, and the other set to capture the top half). After that, I sent the resulting two files to Photoshop, via the MERGE TO PANORAMA function, which produces the vertical panorama I was after. One of the great things about using a tilt-shift lens (specifically the shift function) to shoot panoramas is that you loose next to nothing from the frames when you merge (that is, there is little to no cropping required), so you end up with a HUGE beautiful file to work with. This may sound complicated, but it is not. In fact, I think I’ll try to put a video together showing just how this is done, which I hope to have out in a few weeks. Until then, enjoy the blue portal to the within.
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