Downtown Valdosta Architecture Part 1

While not a huge city, Valdosta still sports a historic downtown area with many landmark buildings. There are several churches and other historic buildings that make for very nice architectural images. I have been meaning to shoot some of them at the proper time of day and finally got my chance.

These images were both shot around 4:30, when the sun was starting to get lower on the horizon. Earlier in the day the lighting would be harsher and the sky would be too light, and a little bit later the sun ends up behind trees and other obstructions making the buildings shadowed.

For this image of the First Baptist Church in downtown, two filters were used - a circular polarizer and a red filter. The CPL filter darkens the sky through polarization (similar to sunglasses) while the red filter removes a lot of blue. The CPL along with various color filters are essential for black & white film photography. Each color affects the contrast of the image by limiting the light which is transmitted to the film (such as the red filter taking out a lot of blue and green).

As you can see, the effect is dramatic. I think it was a little overdone, so I will be redoing this shot at a later date. The steeple seems to fade out to black from slight underexposure, so I will have to work on that next time as well. This image was shot with the Schneider 90mm f/8 lens at f/22 for 1/2 of a second.