Lower Heyford Church

This wonderful little 12th Century church is constructed in a mixture of Cotswold and Hornton stone. It just loves to be photographed and as you can see looks wholly different at different times of the day and in different lights. Here are just some of my many images and of course every one is very idividual. One of the pleasures of photographing this building is the many opportunities for changing the geometry of the gravestones by just moving a couple of feet or changing the focal length of the lens a fraction.

The South side

The early Spring sun had just risen sufficiently to cast the porch window shadows on the wall and highlight the relief on the stonework. The Cotswold and Hornton stones are easy to identify in this light.
I am quite pleased with this picture from a technical standpoint. The image was captured from the boundary wall about 12 metres only from the church. I used a 17 - 40mm lens on my Canon 5D at its short end and as is certain physically a huge amount of barrel distortion and some vignetting is apparent in the RAW image. There is some very clever software available (DxO) which mathematically calculates the inevitability of such distortions if provided with the details of the camera/lens combination and the distance from the subject.I applied this software to this image and then corrected the verticals and removed the overhead power cable in Photoshop. The final image looks stunning at A3+. I wonder if any enthusiast would try a shot of the church from this viewpoint as I would love to compare results using alternative solutions. The beauty of DxO is that it will work also with film images (I think)

Location: Lower Heyford

Photographer: Robin Barker