St Nicolaaskerk

My plans to take some photographs in the St Nicolaaskerk was nearly scuppered by the fact that my 40D died on me last week during the shoot at the Valkerij Manege (fortunate that I have the 20D as backup). My attempt to drop it off to be fixed on the way to Amsterdam (which involved a diversion into the industrial estates near the Ajax football stadium) was unfortunately a complete waste of time, so one of my tasks for the week is to contact Canon and find out what I need to do to sort it out.

Fortunately, despite the trip out on the metro, I still had an hour or so before the practice to take some photographs, and thanks to a prior arrangement with Michael, I was also able to escape the crowds and take some shots from the organ loft, giving a whole new perspective on the church.


There are plenty of features in the church that I would still love to photograph, but preferably on an occasion when the church is closed to visitors (I hadn't appreciated just how busy it gets when open). On this visit I concentrated my efforts on taking some photos with which to try out HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, although I still couldn't resist taking some shots of the murals on the wall. The results are shown in a separate post: St Nicolaaskerk in HDR.


Back at home, I've installed a trial version of Photomatix Pro and produced my first HDR images, shown below. In each case, I've taken 3 input images, and merged them to produce the final image. I feel, though, that I need to spend a little more time reading up on the process in order to truly make the most of it. Not this weekend though!