Church of the Good Shepherd
Jun, 2015Views
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michaellannonbabcock
December 14, 2015
Glad you got there to take this before all the tourists; great conditions! Right place at the right time. This is a shot well worth your efforts!
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Behind The Lens
Location
This is The Church of the Good Shepherd at lake Tekapo in New Zealand's South Island down in Central Otago which is a stunning part of the world and probably one of my favorite places on earth.Time
This is one of those places I head back to time and again all year, it's 3hrs drive from my house which meant dragging myself out of bed just after 4am to hit the road. Thankfully it was winter and sun wasn't going to pup up there until just before 8am so enough time to get there and set up for the sunrise. Unfortunately when I got there... no sunrise so I waited, then about 8:20 touches of blue started to appear, then a bit more and by 8:40 I had enough separation to get a sky that I liked.. then the tour busses turned up! Just as they were starting to empty I shot of about 6 images at different exposures, by 9am the place was filled with tourists and that was it.Lighting
When the sun rises here it comes right up the water and along the hills, it's stunning to see. I waited longer than I wanted to for the light here but it was certainly worth it, typically it starts of with a very red sunrise but then you get lovely soft & long yellows this time of year.Equipment
This was shot on my trusty Canon 50D with a tamron 10-24 at 10mm, F3.5 for 1/250 with a polarizer on the front of the lens. I use a Slik Pro500 tripod which I've had since I started shooting, it does the job really well and let me get really low to get the slightly upward shot.Inspiration
I love Tekapo, I love this church and I think I've been there about 5 times so far with different shots and at different times of the year. I wanted a shot of the church with some cloud and that's normally a winter setting. I loved the clouds rising behind coming from over the hills, the sun is actually directly behind the end of the church and it just lit up so nicely it would be wrong not to shoot it!Editing
I shoot raw images all the time so I get the most amount of data possible. I use lightroom to catalogue everything, do lens adjustments and any clipping that I want to sort out plus dust removal. In this case I used 4 images to create an HDR so I had to be mindful of the fringing from the 10mm wide angle. I then processed it through NIk HDR Efex Pro2 which is probably my favorite go to for HDR, I wanted an image that looked natural so it was a really minimal setting here and then some fine adjustments in Nik Colour Exfex Pro 4 to bring out the detail int eh church and pull a little more from the clouds. Finally U worked through Viveza 2 to pull a little detail from the shadows on the hills behind just to improve the depth of the image.In my camera bag
The Camera bag to be honest varies but generally it's got my new 80D, (used to be a 50D) a Canon 24-105 L, Canon 50mm F1.8 (love this little lens, especially for street photography!) my Tamron 10-24, flash, a pile of Compact flash cards, 2 spare batteries for the camera & some for the flash, a rain cover, spirit level to try and get the horizon where it should be and last but no least at least 1, normally 2 bars of Whittaker's dark chocolate.Feedback
New Zealand is a stunningly beautiful country, the South Island is my favorite and Otago is just rolling hills, light and shadow, you can almost fall out of bed and get a stunning, so suggestion number 1 is always, get out of bed... do it early and be where you shoot from when it's still dark if possible. You can be certain if the light isn't quite right soemthing else will pop up, probably behind you. Go back time & again to your favorite spots. I have a little app for my phone that tells me the sunrise / sunset times of anywhere in the world by GPS position, if your looking for capture sunrises then this is a great way to start and be on time.
