I need a tutorial on shooting the interior of churches/cathedrals using natural light. Will have standard gear e.g., tripod, wide angles and 24 t/s lens. Thanks.
HDR works very well for church interiors and can produce some really stunning pictures of stained glass. I shot the stained glass at a local church and posted a sample on this thread, along with a link to the layer masking technique I used.
I would think bracketing and merging photos would be a must for this type of photo..to get detail in the windows and everywhere else.
You could shoot it at late in the day with the sun nearly at the horizon, but I'm still not sure if that would solve the dynamic range problems you are going to run into.
When I was shooting film in Germany many years ago it was easy to get really superb photos of just the windows (IF the church allowed tripods, no EVER allowed flash use in my day). We we tried to work the actual church interiors, the windows would be so overexposed that the photos were invariably useless. We resorted to scheduling late afternoon rainy and heavily overcast days for those shots, since it let us even the light out a little bit.
Even with today's camera technology, the issue is going to be how to record what would amount to 12-15 stops of light change...........it simply isn't do-able in camera in a single exposure.
I think the HDR process (layer masking or with specific software) is your best bet.
