I arrived to the Cathedral just in time for Sunset, however much of the golden light only managed to touch its towers. Standing out from the block flats and roads surrounding it, there is a large car park in front of the main entrance. During my visit there was a steady trickle of locals visiting it.
My main setup was my A7III with Sigma 20mm 1.4 Art lens, however for a couple of shots I popped on my 35mm Tamron 1.4 and 85mm Sony 1.4 G Master.
I didn’t have a tripod, so everything was photographed handheld… Not impressive – yet. Wait until we get to the inside of the Cathedral.
The inside proved to be a very interesting to to test the image stabilization and dynamic range of the full frame phenom that is the Sony A7III.
Sony A7III, 20mm Sigma 1.4 Art.
Settings: SS 1/100, F/11, ISO 1250
The outer stonework was breathtaking, with intricate carvings on all sides of the building.
Before entering the Cathedral (left) and after exitting the Cathedral (right).
These photos were taken over the roof of cars, with the 85mm 1.4 G Master.
Left: One of the Cathedral towers.
Top Right: A chapel, on the edges of the Cathedral grounds.
Bottom Right: A different view (earlier photograph at the top of this blog post) of the monument close to the Cathedral.
These photos were taken handheld, and with the Newer 2-in-1 convertible camera wheel bag and backpack on my back, so I didn’t want to go below 1/15 shutter speed for fear of camera shake.
Sure enough, in review there is blurring in some shots where I wasn’t entirely steady, but given that I was crouching and almost looking up completely vertically for some of the photos, it’s amazing I was able to photograph inside at all.
Why were you using the viewfinder you ask? I find positioning myself centrally using the back screen of the Sony difficult at best, and the electronic viewfinder shows much more detail than the lower resolution screen. I’m sure I would be able to go below 1/15 second shutter speed if I wasn’t in such precarious positions, with the weight of the bag on me.
For the scene I would have ideally had a small tripod, which would allow me to take multiple exposures in order to blend them together into an HDR image later on, however the A7III gave me acceptable information from its single images.
Camera settings for images above and right: SS 1/15, F/4.5, ISO 10000
All the photos in this blog post were edited only using Adobe Lightroom CC, so I’m super impressed that I was able to get such clean images, even at ISO 10000.
I’ve included a JPEG unedited, straight from the camera, for a little comparison. I think the Sony does a really good job of dealing with a scene with extreme highlights and shadows out of the gates, but by shooting in uncompressed RAW I was able to show even more of the detail through a little bit of post-processing.
