Looking up

With some trepidation I attended a Cambridge Photography Club Critique group. The idea is you submit photos with a theme and others present critique them. It turns out to be a fairly gentle experience but the comments given are well considered and provide useful insights in how photographs should have been better taken or might be improved. The latter is Photoshop/Lightroom of course but it’s surprising how much difference a simple crop can make.

I submitted half a dozen photos including four ‘of domes’. Since the event I’ve sourced a fifth to make a set of five. The photo above is one of the others and taken at Ely on the morning of the event. Because you must pay to go into the cathedral proper, perfectly reasonable, it’s not a dome so not one of this set.

The first of the five is the one that was not shown at the event. This was taken in 2017 and is the Capela do Fundador at the Batalha Monastery in Batalha, Portugal

Number two was taken in 2018 and is the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat, Oman

The other three shots were post Covid. Number three was taken in 2023 and is the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin, Italy. It’s perhaps the most dramatic of the five.

Number four was taken in April of this year (2024) and is Cathedral of St Barnabas and St Makarios in Nicosia, Cyprus. It’s actually a merge of two shots with one exposed for the main image and the other for the windows.

Finally number five was taken just last month (Nov 24) and is the Medici Chapel in Florence, Italy. This is an HDR merge of three shots. Sadly my Zoom only goes down to 28mm which wasn’t quite enough.

And finally credit where it’s due: all five photographs were taken whilst I was on Voyages Jules Verne holidays.