During 2015 I’ve been working on photographing the memorial stained glass windows in St. Luke’s Church here in Oamaru.
St. Luke’s is a category one historic place.
It was built in three stages from 1866 and it’s said that it was the first building in the district constructed from Oamaru stone. If you are visiting you can see some wonderful photographs of all the building stages. They are on the north wall inside behind the visitors’ desk.
It’s a privilege to work on windows like these, but the difficulty of photographing them is that you can’t get a cherry-picker inside to get the middle of the window at eye level. So there is a lot of perspective adjustment to do. There is the possibility of using tall ladders, but then other issues arise with keeping the camera still enough for the long exposures necessary to capture all the detail.
I ended up using flood lights to illuminate the stonework, and then divided each window into several parts and made different exposures of each to ensure an accurate result. The files were then stitched in Autopano Pro for perspective control and final adjustments to hue made in Photoshop.
The left pane of the Rev Algernon Gifford window depicts St. Luke, and has been printed as a bookmark available from the visitors’ desk. They’re free but make a donation.