Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Ceiling

I was captivated by the patterns and symmetry of the vast, sprawling ceiling at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and wanted to capture the ceiling in its entirety. This is not an easy task given the size of the ceiling and this took some planning to pull off. On my second visit, I used a tripod several feet off the floor with a 10-22 mm wide angle lens at 10 mm (16 mm with 1.6X crop factor). However, even at 16 mm, the exposure was not wide enough to capture the lights, and I really wanted the lights to frame the photo. On my third visit, I took the tripod down further so that the camera was about six inches off the ground. I took multiple overlapping frames spanning the ceiling with the intent of stitching the photos together. Exposures were at 100 ISO, f6.3, and 15 seconds in RAW format.

Post production, I stitched three overlapping photos together in Photoshop Elements. I used the crop and straighten features in Aperture 3 to ensure that the final photo was symmetric. Eventually, I was able to work with the exposures to capture the lights, which frame the photo.

churchcathedralphotoKent Beckernot my day job photographyFifth Avenue Presbyterian5th Ave PresbyterianNew Yorkceiling