week fourteen — mount carmel

holy ISO! i went on my first photo walk with my new camera, a Canon EOS 6D with a beautiful full frame sensor, last night. one of the many significant improvements over my Rebel T3i is the 6D’s ability to shoot at stupid-high ISO levels without an unacceptable level of noise. essentially, the higher the ISO value, the more sensitive the camera is to light, and thus the more flexibility you have to shoot in low light scenarios. this added flexibility generally comes with a cost of noisy/grainy pictures. the 6D’s sensor is able to suppress this noise, even at very high (e.g., 12,800) ISO levels, though. this allowed me to take a sharp handheld nighttime picture that wasn’t too grainy for me to upload in high resolution. awesome.

enough nerdspeak about cameras, though. a little about the shot itself… this is the “our lady of mount carmel academy” building that’s a half mile or so from my apartment in lakeview. i’ve been fascinated with religious architecture ever since visiting europe in high school. reading pillars of the earth encouraged this fascination, and i’ve been wanting to do a photo series on religious architecture for quite awhile now…the only holdups are that i need someone who knows something about religion and someone who knows something about architecture to help me understand what i’m shooting…amusing that i’m so drawn to something that i really know nothing about…

anyways, i pass this building quite a bit on my runs, so i did a little research on it awhile back. apparently, mount carmel is a mountain range in Israel, so i thought it would be fitting to shoot the building looking upwards, encouraging the viewer’s eye to start with the ornate lintel (is that even a lintel?? this is why i need an architecture buff to help me out…) in the lower lefthand corner, and then slowly climb to the building’s summit. ideally, there would have been some sort of heavenly feature (shooting star, etc.) to really round the shot out, but no such luck. so, i merged a long exposure star trail shot i took in wyoming last year to add a little bit of flavor to the night sky. click on the picture to see the full screen version, and enjoy!