The Strasbourg Cathedral Photo

Photographer’s Note

"The church portals are beautiful, particularly the Roman portal; there are truly superb figures on horseback, the rose-window is noble and well-cut, the entire front of the church is a clever poem. But the true triumph of this Cathedral is the spire. It is a veritable tiara of stone with its crown and its cross. It is a gigantic and delicate marvel."

These are few words from quite a good specialist... The one who wrote wonderful pages on another famous cathedral in his novel entitled "Notre-Dame de Paris".

The building of the Notre-Dame cathedral started in 1015 and shows a vertiginous front wall. Her top is about 140 metres high which made her the highest Christian construction up to the early 19th century.

I believe this point of view conveys quite well this amazing heighness together with the magnificient sculptures. Taken with a low evening light, one can see the nice red colors of the stones used for the building.

This is the original framing. I increased saturation a little bit, used a light unsharp mask and resized to the TE format. I have one regret only, the original picture was so big that I lost a lot of details and color tones by compressing the picture up to 75% and reducing the format through using a white framing...

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Critiques | Translate

Didi (37199) 2004-03-01 18:17

Plein la vue ! prise de vue vertigineuse, on peut compter une à une et admirer chaque détail des sculptures.
Pensez vous escalader le monument ?

milloup (1829) 2004-03-01 18:34

Impressive angle, and impressive amount of detail. A clearcut canditate for this vertigo theme someone is running (if I've understood Said's comment correctly, he thinks the same ;-)) Good use of DOF.

Catcher (850) 2004-03-01 18:40

There´s a lot of detail indeed althought the angle is not the best! i would love to see the foto in a straight way!

mimi (2321) 2004-03-01 19:33

Although it took me a little while to decide, I do like the angle. The building is beautiful and even though you had to compress a lot, you can still see quite a bit of the detail. However, the sky looks a bit unnatural or oversaturated to me.

allotfy (1525) 2004-03-01 19:42

Wow .. a lot of art works ,very nice angle and great lighting .. it is very hard shot and you did it well
thanks for the Useful note

shyeen (317) 2004-03-01 22:18

It's a nice piece of work! Can feel the tremendous of the church.
Just there is a little shadow at the left bottom corner.

pamastro (7215) 2004-03-01 22:59

There's a lot of delicacy here. It really comes out of the stone beautifully. The angle is very dramatic especially with the crispness. It really soars upward strongly. All the decoration points so well in the upward direction. Good job.

Eagle78 (1925) 2004-03-02 15:59

A wonderful perspective Steven! The details and patterns of the cathedral are really great. I don´t know if that was possible but i would have tried to avoid the shadow on the down left side...anyway a great image, no doubt :)

chrischris (859) 2004-03-03 5:05

Superbe cathédrale. J'aime tout particulièrement les prises de vue "d'icônes" qui rompt avec les angles classiques. C'est chose faite ici, ce cliché est original et restitue à merveille les détails sculpturaux de la façade. L'exposition compose bien avec le jeu d'ombre et de lumière et a été parfaitement dosée. Très belle photo.

ilouy (3344) 2004-03-03 12:54

This picture shows in a very good way details of this magnificient architecture work. It is hard to do but the angle of view here is really interesting and original.

Rubys (154) 2004-03-09 15:37