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With 22mm (35mm equivalent) I couldn't do it, but with 17mmm I can. What is it? The answer is fit this church into the frame in landscape format while showing the "semi-detached" nature of its tower.The village of Donington - like many villages in the Lincolnshire area called Holland - has a big medieval church, a reflection of the relative prosperity of this area in the middle ages when sheep roamed the flat landscape. However, like a lot of these big churches, St Mary and the Holy Rood is fairly near to the road, has houses in close proximity, and its churchyard has a retaining wall and very tall trees. Consequently, the number of positions for a photographer who wants to capture the whole of the building, are relatively few. My recent purchase of the 17-40mm zoom, a lens that covers the range from "ultra-wide" to "normal" has solved my problem at Donington. Over the next few months I'll try it out on other local churches where this is an issue.
When I first bought an SLR in the early 1970s 35mm was considered a wide angle lens. Gradually, over the years, this came to be seen as a relatively normal focal length, and 28mm became the widest that the average amateur photographer aspired to. Today 24mm is relatively common and the enthusiast can choose from a range of wide angle lenses that go down to around 10mm, at which point the "fish-eye" lens with a 180 degree field of view enters the equation. As a result of this widening of lenses and of choice, images with distortion are much more common than formerly, and viewers are much more accepting of it. But, I'm not. Perhaps it's the legacy of my days with longer focal lengths, or perhaps it's my interest in painting and architecture. Whatever the reason, with some images I just have to straighten the verticals. Any time you point the camera up or down, and straight lines feature in the subject, you get convergence. With a wide angle, however, they occur much more frequently and noticeably. Today's image had them, and they've been corrected, as has the building's relative height. But, what can't be corrected is the proper ratios within the building. Here the chancel looks bigger than it is in real life, and the balance of tower to spire isn't quite right. One day there will doubtless be software that can deal with these anomalies. Until then, this is the best I could do as the late November sun started to disappear behind the nearby houses and trees.
For more of my images of the exterior of this church see here, here and here.
photograph and text (c) T. Boughen
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation:N/A
