In the Summer of 2017, as part of the Cheltenham Music Festival, I took part in a performance of Berlioz' Grande Messe des Morts in Gloucester Cathedral. As moving as this experience was, the sight of the Cloisters to the North of the Cathedral proper completely blew my mind. That such beauty could be wrought by the hand of Man just defies the imagination. I had seen it in photographs before and, of course, in the Harry Potter movies, but nothing had quite prepared me for how it looked and felt in reality. At that time, however, I had little time to just stand and stare, but it sowed the seed in my mind: I'll be back.

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It was only later that year that, having reached a turning point in my life, I decided to start to take photography more seriously and invested in both equipment and training. There certainly was a great deal to learn (and there still is).

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It was in the following January, on a bright, but very cold Winter's day, that I took it in my mind to go and drink in the sights and atmosphere of Gloucester Cathedral, this time in an unhurried and unstressed way. That didn't quite happen. My visit started out in a very stressed way indeed because, having arrived at the Cathedral and going to pay my "photographers fee" at the entrance, I realised that my wallet was no longer in my pocket; I must have dropped it somewhere between the multi-storey car park and the Cathedral, a walk of about 1/2 mile, right through the city centre. I retraced my steps all the way back to the car, scanning the ground all the while for any sign of my missing wallet, to no avail. I asked at the car park office if anything had been handed in, but no. It was only when I got back to the car itself that I found it, on the floor, right underneath the driver's door. Phew!!!

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Back at the Cathedral, buoyed up with waves of relief, I paid my fee and immediately set off into the Cloisters. Walking all around, I eventually scouted out the shot that I wanted: a symmetrical shot from the South-West corner, taking in both the West and South walks. The positive side of this location was the view: beautiful, ancient stained glass along the top of both corridors with more down at the extreme end of the West walk, a wonderful, old, wooden door in the foreground and, stretching along the length of the South walk, the "carrels", a row of 20 niche-like spaces which would have originally housed desks at which the monks would study. The "problems" with this location from which to shoot were several: the West walk contains, in the distance, the entrance to the Cathedral café and so is a path much-trodden by hordes of tourists; the angle to be captured is somewhat over 45º, so either a pretty wide-angle lens would be required, or a multi-shot panorama. Both have their challenges, with the panorama option requiring much more effort (and time) but potentially yielding a much higher-resolution image. However, I wasn't constrained on time, so the panorama option it was (though I did take some wide-angle shots, just for insurance). The other challenge was the sheer range of light levels that day, with the sun streaming through the stained glass and the pretty dark shadows within the depths of the stonework.

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None-daunted, I set up my tripod (yes, they are allowed) in the appropriate place and composed my panorama. It was to be a sequence of four separate images with the camera panned from left to right (with significant overlap), to be "stitched" together in software once back at home to create a single, seamless, wide image. That was the theory anyway.   

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But nothing is that simple. The issues with a) the "dynamic range" of light and b) the constant flow of tourists to and from the café, which I really didn't want in the final image, needed to be addressed.

The problem with very high dynamic range is that camera sensors simply can't cope in a single shot; your own eyes can because, when you look at a bright object, your pupils contract to regulate the "exposure" that you see. The converse is true when you look into the shadows. A camera, however, sees it all at the same time and can't alter the exposure depending on which bit of the scene you're looking at. The result, for a single shot is, therefore, either very over-exposed highlights or under-exposed shadows (or both). The solution is to take multiple, identically composed shots at different exposures to cover the entire dynamic range of the scene, a process known as "exposure bracketing". The shortest exposure should be chosen to have the highlights correctly exposed, accepting that the shadows will be completely black, whilst the longest exposure should reveal all the detail in the shadows, accepting that the highlights will all be "blown-out". Intermediate exposures will bridge the gap between the two, which is important when processing later. In this case, for exposure-bracketing purposes, I took between 5 and 7 shots (depending on how bright/dark that part of the scene was), 1EV apart, in each of the four slices of the panorama. That's a lot of photographs to be dealt-with back at home.

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Tourists (I say, somewhat hypocritically, because I probably was one)! How to deal with tourists? Just waiting for zero tourists didn't seem to be an option - there were just too many around. The West walk was a particular hot-spot since it was the location of the access to the café and so saw more or less constant foot-traffic. Rather more extreme options, obviously, would be either impractical or downright illegal (I'll say no more), so I had to content myself with using photographic techniques to achieve my tourist-free ambitions, even in the presence of loads of them. The method I chose to employ relies on the fact that people move, whereas the architecture doesn't. It involves taking lots of shots (all exposure bracketed), whilst ensuring that the people have moved sufficiently so as not to occupy the same area in the frame across the totality of shots, and you're good to go. The only things to be aware of are a) that the light levels don't change drastically (which they didn't) and b) the camera doesn't move at all (hence the use of a tripod), making it possible to successfully align the images later on. Then it's a matter of  "layering-out" the tourists during post-processing back at home.

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In the end, I sat there, on a stone ledge, protecting both camera and tripod, taking photographs for well over an hour and a quarter. Remember, it was January and the stone I was perched on was cold!!! - my rear-end was absolutely frozen by the time I was done. But I thought that I had all the raw data I needed to be able to make something of it back at home. Couldn't be 100% sure though, because you never know until you actually try to process it all.