The inside of the church is generally quite plain, but it still contains hidden gems, particularly in the stained glass and features in the stonework.
A project was initiated in 2011 to create an altar frontal in needlecraft. This was to be the first project undertaken by the newly formed Combrook Art and Craft group.
This is a major project which will take up to two years to complete in its entirety. For the purposes of this OCA assignment therefore, it is only possible to record the start of this project, although as a personal project, I plan to follow its development and record it as a historical record.
Photographically, it is wide ranging. The inspiration for the project comes from elements of the church and locality. The materials used represent a wide range range of textures and colours. Then there's the human element of a group of people working together on a shared endeavour.
Sadly, one of the central people in the group passed away over Christmas, so this project will inevitably become something of a memorial to her.
Combrook Church, England.
Ths is the classic view of the church, taken mid afternoon with the sun face onto the front of the building. Compositionally, its biased too far to the left and could benefit from cropping on the right side. Additionally, it would be good to have a point of interest in the foreground.
Colour wise, the image is unmodified with only minor adustments in Photoshop.
Generally a fairly unremarkable image, though a tighter crop could make for a more dramatic opening shot....
This second image is simply a record of the thoughts behind the project. Its not artistic in any way, only the coloured cloth in the background giving any hint at the creativity to be captured in the frontal.
Lighting wise, the only consideration was to use diffused light to prevent any highlights on the (laminated) paper.
To anyone who visits the church, this shot captures two key elements of the building, namely the candles on the end of each pew, and the stained glass window in the bell tower which is a key element in the altar frontal.
Compositionally, the two elements balance each other, though the white of the candle is perhaps a little high in the frame (and would benefit from being lit!).
The shot was taken on a dull day, metering for the light passing through the window, using a hotshoe mounted flash to illuminate the candle. Some light from other windows can be seen on the lower right corner behind the candle. Ideally, the other windows would have been blacked out, with the flashgun taken off the camera to give a more three dimensional look to the candle.
Here, the key point is symmetry. The existing plain altar frontal is seen, under the window which provides one of the key compositional elements of the frontal design.
Contrary to the current vogue, this was not a 'HDR' image, but rather a heavily manipulated image exposed for the stained glass window. Up in the roof, the quality of the image is clearly very poor, a result of the electronic noise, amplified by Photoshop in an attempt to give some detail in the shadows.
This is a closeup of the altar frontal foor tiles, another inspiration for the design. Again, symmetry is the key to this design. The lighting was by means of an off camera flash bounced onto a reflector to try to avoid highlights. This wasn't totally effective - in hindsight I needed multiple lights to illuminate the floor from different angles, each with a diffuser. With the time available, this was not possible, but I would like to reshoot this image.
This is one of the smaller stained glass windows, and perhaps one of the most beautiful in the church. Its a balanced flash image, metering for the glass whilst filling in the stonework with an off camera flash. Again, the light isn't completely even over the glass, mainly due to the uneven illumination on the back side of the window.
A similar problem of uneven lighting affects the carved wooden seat in the church. Once again, it was illuminated by off camera flash, bounced off a reflector, but again causing a highlight off the wood which I was trying to avoid.
Again, its very much a 'record' shot with little artistic interest.
Finally, here are the organ pipes, again suffering from uneven lighting. The exercise of taking these shots was a good illustration of the difficulty of getting uniform illumination.
With the elements used for inspiration, I switched to illustrating the design and creative aspects of the project, even before any patchworking started.
Here is the paper design for the new altar frontal, itself created by hand using elements from the church as inspiration. The complete design is somewhat larger - this is barely one quarter, but I wanted to focus on the shape of the window and the draughting tools used.
The lighting is from both sides, although the key light is from the right side. Both lights were diffused to avoid excessive highlights in the erasing shield and compasses.
The new frontal will be a patchwork of material, chosen for their colour, texture and durability, an important aspect in something which it is hoped will stand the test of time.
I'd like to reshoot this image, using a more carefully selected range of materials, and perhaps some of the tools used to cut and sew them together. I'll aim to get this done this weekend.
Ultimately this project is about a group of people coming together to create a piece of artwork for the community. When the group next gets together, I would like to capture some images of the group at work and add them to the blog. Until then, this is my wife working at home.
The lighting is provided by a table lamp from the right side with no modification, intended to give some directionality and a sufficiently high shutter speed to avoid too much blur.
Compositionally, there is a strong diagonal in the image, formed by the edge of the table. One side is my wife, the other, one part of the patchwork.
In the coming days, I hope to add more images to illustrate the project.
