Fuji X100s, Low Light Examples

Just as an example for those who might care, the following two images were hand held (likely supported on a bench or railing, if I remember right) inside your standard, low light, Gothic cathedral.

I used ISO 3200 and f/2.8, letting the shutter speed fall where it may. In Camera Raw, I needed to sharpen, reduce noise, then pull down the highlights (windows) and pull up the shadows a bit. Once in Photoshop, I did some cloning cleanup and slight cropping, then ran the images through a custom filter I made up in Nik/Google Color Efex Pro to bring out the contrast and detail.

(Santa María del Mar, to be sure, is no “standard” cathedral. It is a superb example of Catalan Gothic architecture with the flying buttresses enclosed and thus used to beautifully expand the indoor volume. The church “of the people” was completed in 55 years after starting construction in 1329–the Barcelona Cathedral, in contrast took some 500 years to finish. See the book, Cathedral of the Sea by Idelfonso Falcones for a wonderful fictional, but historical, account of the construction of Santa María del Mar.)

Santa María del Mar #1. Barcelona, 2014

Santa María del Mar #9. Barcelona, 2014

Postscript: Here are three more handheld Fuji X100s images, this time from the main Barcelona Cathedral. I think the post-processing is a bit better. Also, there is more light in certain areas of the Barcelona Cathedral than in Santa María del Mar, so the ISOs varied–note the metadata. (On the vertical image…for some reason vertical images don’t look as sharp as the horizontal format on this WordPress website, a problem I am looking into…)