Library of Trinity College

What a magnificent library in Dublin!

This picture is actually also a panorama, however sometimes you need a certain technique to show the splender of a location. In this case a panorama of the Library of Trinity College

Me, my brother and my father went on a city trip to Dublin in September 2015. The whole weekend was great for being together, but also to discover some new things. We all had our interests (my father for instance wanted to see the statue of Molly Malone because of the song of The Dubliners) and one of the things I wanted to –next to that great prison– see was the library of Trinity College. I once saw a picture of the library online and since then I wanted to see it. Actually, I store pics of the places I still want to go and map these out; whenever an occasion comes along or can be created to go there, I have an opportunity to go there. Sort of a bucket list 🙂

The reason why I wanted to see the library was because the structure and the grandness of the main hall. It is just such a great building with the wood and the iron staircases. Really magnificent. However… it is always busy there! Therefore, to show the grandness and to still show also all the structure of the building, I tried to compose the image from three separate images and stitch them together. One of the ceiling directly above my head, one of the size of the hall and one to give some perspective from the ground, without having all the people on it. One of the options at that moment was to shoot over the heads of all the people. I did not have any ND filters with me, so a long exposure was no option. A stacked image to remove the people (instruction video) was also no option because of the narrow space and the amount of people.

To get as much of the space in the picture, I stood right up to the wall and used my wide angle lens. I put it on 10mm, and bumped the ISO up to 3200. I had to do this because of the fact that the hall was pretty dark. I had my camera on aperture priority to open the diaphragm as much as possible to let as much as possible the light onto the sensor. The camera then selected a 1/20th exposure… which is very slow, especially for a hand held photograph. Therefore, I lent all the way to the wall to get as stable as possible. The three photo’s were shot in succession with the first photo being the one of the ceiling above me. This was the darkest one, and to get the detail on the ceiling I focused all my settings on that part. This meant that there was a chance to overexpose the lowest shot, due to the light coming from the blinded windows. In the end, only the door on the other side of the library is overexposed.
In Adobe After Effects I stitched the three images and played a bit with the highlights and the shadows. Seeing the picture now again, I could have done something more with the aligning (the balcony behind and above my back is not really straight) but this would also contribute to some distortions in other places.

Learning moment: Take a tripod and ND filters when photographing this kind of places. At this moment it is not the great shot I was after but it turned out to be a great impulsive photo of a great building!

Camera settings:

Location