L’Estany, Cloistre, #4. Catalunya, 2019
Yes, the “golden hours” right around sunrise and sunset can have some wonderful light and we photographers will be forever pursuing it, as we should–especially those who do classic landscapes.
But…what do you do with a molten mid-day sun and the resultant harsh lighting?
Might I suggest that a black and white conversion could be one possible answer? Throw in some different patterns, shapes, forms, repetition, some high contrast, and so on, and you just might come up with something reasonably interesting.
On this particular day, a couple of weeks ago, I tried just that.
So, here are some examples of that photographic approach primarily using the cloister found at the Santa Maria de l’Estany Monastery as the main subject. The church/monastery has an original founding date of 1080 (various constructions and reconstructions over the years, of course), and the cloister from the early 1300s (again, with reconstructions). The latter, with it’s sculpted columns, is considered “one of the jewels of Catalan Romanesque architecture” and the tour buses come and go with regularity.
My two favorite photographs are at the end where I tried to push the harsh, high-contrast lighting more into the realm of the abstract. And this is what you might want to do: when faced with difficult lighting, simply emphasize it!
First, here is sort of an overview image of the church in l’Estany to show you what the day was like–mostly uninteresting sky, harsh mid-day light. Note the ribbons (yellow) tied to the railing. This is related to the Catalan independence movement and the Catalan leaders still in jail or in exile for their role in the October 1, 2017 independence referendum:
L’Estany, #14. Catalunya, 2019
Inside the cloister, my eye started in initially with the repeating patterns and how the contrasty light played in and around the stone, the highlights almost glowing in some areas. I used the highlight-weighted metering mode (with 2/3 stop of + exposure compensation dialed in) almost exclusively so as to preserve the highlights since it is easy enough to bring up the shadows in Camera Raw:
L’Estany, Cloistre, #1. Catalunya, 2019
L’Estany, Cloistre, #2. Catalunya, 2019
L’Estany, Cloistre, #5. Catalunya, 2019
Another composition option might be to move in to the details:
L’Estany, Cloistre, #6. Catalunya, 2019
L’Estany, Cloistre, #9. Catalunya, 2019
Or you could play with depth-of-field a bit:
L’Estany, Cloistre, #10. Catalunya, 2019
For me, though, what gave me the most satisfaction was to emphasize the high contrast that aleady existed–first in the cloister (on the floor, are those the ghostly shapes of the monks marching to mass?), then at the church entrance (this latter making for a very interesting and mysterious print which used up a pile of black ink):
L’Estany, Cloistre, #7. Catalunya, 2019
L’Estany, #13. Catalunya, 2019
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