Church
As I mentioned in yesterday’s teaser shot here on the blog, I spent an amazing day jetting from one great URBEX location to another. I still remember arriving at this particular location, somewhere 😉 south of Magdeburg, Germany, with plenty of time to spare before the sunrise. While the rest of the crew was already busy inside, I headed off to the south-west corner of the church yard to snag these brackets peering through the years of growth back toward the church and the rising sun. This was the first of two abandoned churches we explored, though there were so many more in the southern part of former East Germany begging for a visit. So many site, so little time! (Creative notes: I post processed this shot to Nox Arcana’s Veil of Darkness. I shot these brackets with my Nikon D700 and Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. Post processing done using Photomatix Pro, and several plug-in filters from Nik Software.)
Show of hands! How many of you have read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or watched any of the many movie versions? If you have, you almost certainly remember the scene of Ebenezer’s Scrooge’s transformation near the end of the story after when Ebenezer awakens into his new life following the visit of the Ghost of Christmas Future. Everything in the world is now new, bright and beautiful to him. He was reborn. When I drove past this scene the yesterday with my family I was reminded of that beautiful day of Christmas he did not miss after-all, and I quickly pulled over to capture the scene. Sadly, I was in such a rush that I forgot to reset my camera’s ISO to 200 from the 500 I had used the day before indoors, so I had to do a little extra cleaning up of the extra noise produced in post-processing when I blended all the brackets together in Photomatix Pro. While I’m not entirely happy with the final results (specifically, loss of detail on the Berliner Dom), I am satisfied enough to post the result here for you to see.
