FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, ELLSWORTH, MAINE

I made this photograph of the First Congregational Church in Ellsworth, Maine while on a trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. My good friend Carl and I stopped when we saw the steeple. We had driven quite a distance and he hadn’t yet seen the “right” white steeple of a New England church. He lives in California, I live in Texas. No white steeples.

Churches in New England look very different from churches in the West or South. In Texas, they frequently resemble malls. I’m partial to New England churches, I grew up in Vermont, after all, and I prefer their architecture, design elements and presence. Most are located on the town square and echo the no frills, no nonsense character of the area’s founders and inhabitants. We stopped at around noon, it was a clear day and the sun was bright, turning the white church into an opportunity for interesting black and white imagery.

The color file is OK but lacks interest. I use Adobe Lightroom and photographs like this make me appreciate the software even more. I made sure I had a good white exposure and didn’t worry too much about where my blacks would fall. The sky was very blue and in Lightroom, I first converted the image to grayscale and then selectively adjusted the tone of the sky with the blue slider, taking it down from a middle gray value. I wanted the sky almost black and adjusting the blue slider allowed me to do that without affecting the value of the white clouds in the image. Burning the sky area or using the graduated filter tool would have brought down the value of the sky but would have also muddied the white clouds, which I didn’t want.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/antoniogerman/