A very heavily compressed version of a six frame, hand held, panorama. Individual frames processed with PL7, stitching done with MS Image Composite Editor, using a fish eye projection.
The nave ceiling of La Sagrada Familia.
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Thatâs pretty good! Plenty of detail, and I didnât notice any flare or other artifacts. PhotoLab/ViewPoint can correct the tilt at either end, which I find hard to avoid.
Iâm leaving for Spain tomorrow, and this church is one of the last stops on my tour. Packing light, so Iâll probably try some panoramas like this one. Maybe Iâll bring along a manual fisheye, too, which isnât supported by DxO but gives good results anyway. (Some day Iâll get the supported auto-focus fisheye! But itâs much less portable.)
Impressively demonstrates the genius of GaudĂ.
If youâve not already pre-booked your tickets for La Sagrada Familia, do it NOW. They are only available on-line, you canât show up and join a queue and they sell out very quickly. They were sold out over a week in advance when I was there a few days ago.
The six images that make up this panorama were taken with a Canon EFS 17-55 lens, at 17mm and with the camera held in portrait orientation.
MS ICE allows you to choose the projection type for the panorama. If I remember correctly, this one defaulted to transverse cylinder, but that made the base of the columns decidedly curved. Switching to a fisheye projection didnât eliminate the distortion but it helped a lot. Further experimentation is on the âto doâ list.
Well, sort of 
Most of Gaudiâs actual plans for the building were lost during the Spanish Civil War, i.e. what you see is the best guess of Gaudiâs vision made by the subsequent architects overseeing the project.
Thank you, thatâs important to know! Fortunately my tour was prearranged through a pilgrimage company. Iâm in a group of eight - weâre traveling on our own but joining scheduled tours at each stop. First thing Iâll do is make sure that weâre going to La Sagrada Familia as planned. If something went sideways, Iâll try to squeeze it in, as there will be free time before I return home.
Yes, itâs a phenomenal building. Iâve pencilled in a return visit for 2027, by which time it should be âcompleteâ, i.e. there should only be a few years of adornments and embellishments to do.
I was at a conference in Barcelona maybe 15 years ago and at that time I did not have to book anything at all. I just went in there.
From what I remember these new parts were very odd compared to the older ones and felt very much like something coming from a completely different and more sterile age and culture. Like it hade been ripped a part from another building and brutally forced to fit in an unfinished part of an older part and isnât it just what it was? There is not all that much harmony to the the building that partly then was more like a construction site but even then it was very impressive.
Itâs still a construction site outside. The facade on the north side, the Nativity facade, is the one that was Gaudiâs main focus. The Passion facade on the south side is more stark, but the subject matter is stark.
Thanks to this tread and the improvements of the RAW-processing in Photolab over time and not the least the ones in version 8, I decided to reprocess all the pictures I took 2005 when I was in Barcelona on a job conference (Microsoft IT-Forums) and it really gave them a facelift. The truth is that I didn´t bother at that time to finish them properly because I wasn´t all that impressed by them myself at that time because of the noise levels we then had no cure for really.
They are all taken with my first DSLR-camera KonicaMinolta D7D (with 6 megapixel CCD-sensor that like most CCD-cameras was hopeless in low light and barely fixed ISO 400 at itâs best ). On the other hand, it was kind of revolutionary, because it was the first DSLR ever with sensor-stabilization which they called âAnti Shakeâ that partly countered the poor low light properties of the sensor (two stops).
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D Review: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
D7D is supported with profiles in Photolab but so is not the really lousy kit-lens, so of that reason I get no support today of of âLens correctionâ in Photoab 8. That lens was so poorly assembled that it litterally treathened to fall apart when 2 of three skrevs fixating the lens package totally urscrewed secretly after it got a hit by accident in an airlock in a department store. After a while I got aware of that problem. Well, never the less I got my pictures of this truely remarkable âbrutalisticâ building despite the limitations of my year 2005 equipment.
Originally these pictures were also processed by Lightroom 1.0 that was a really lousy version of that software, that I truely hated of all my heart. I used it just because Adobe just had made a hostile take over of the danish company (Pixmantec) and discontinued (over night) the converter I used called RawShootermade. When Adobe saw RawShooter building up momentum raelly fast on the market, they eecided to kill it by a hostile take over. We got Lightroom for free as some sort of mixed excause and attempt not ti loose the market share they just had bought. For us users it took many years before Adobe got in par with the previw quality level we had already got used to 2005 in Pixmantec RawShooter Premium.
In fact we had to wait until version 3.x of LR before it was usable really but not even the version 3.0 had all that impressive previws to offer for my Minolta MRW and Sony ARW-files. Despite that version 3.0 might have been the biggest improvement in one single step Lightroom has ever seen in all these years but I think it could even have been better if they in their arrogance had learned a few preview display tricks from the danish engineeers.
So here are a few of these shots:
What I remembered was all these âbuilding cranesâ. It was truely a very active construction site the 15 november 2005 when these pictures were taken
Here you can see the still open end of the basilica. The roof vault is still under work.
Here the totally overloaded entrance of the older part of the church.
Just look at the details of how these stones are dressed and fitted. I was raised in a family where the men had been stone cutters/dressers and lumber jacks for generations in the north of Sweden (they worked in the forrests in the winter and worked with stone constructions in the other part of the year) and my father was the last one in my family to know that trade, so despite that I helped my father in the summers with his work out here in the islands I never took up that trade but because of these experiences I really know to appreciate stone works like the ones in Sagrada Familia.
On Wikipedia you can read about that the main reason why Sagrada Famila wasn´t finished a long time ago was because the construction have been dependent on donor funding. I think it also must be an explanation that the ambitions they had in the beginning were so extremely high. I think Guidi had a chioce to make and I think he took a far more simplistic way than his pedecessors of a very good reason. But as we know that didn´t help either because Sagrada Familia it is still very much a work in progress and according to Wikipedia it might be completed in 2026 (if God gives his support :-). Gaudi never got to finish his work before he died.
Details
The newer entrance
The impressive brutal new roof valts
I must say that I´m surprised how good the pictures did came out technically with the help of the 20 years of evolution of the RAW-converter technology we now have access to in Photolab 8, despite the flaws of my old lens and the limitations of the old D7D CCD-sensor. Today I have a lot better gear and it would have been very interesting to visit this place again. It would have been interesting to see what my A7 IV could make of it with the far better lenses I have today. With A7 IV the ISO limit is not 400 but 10 000 or even 12 800, when I use it with Photolab 8. That is a significant difference and on top of that D7D might have added a couple of steps stabiliztion and A7 IV adds about the double. Newer cameras like A7 IV or Canon R5 also are able to lock autofocus in much darker environments than my ols D7D.
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Super pictures (esp. for the time you took them).
What strikes me about the Sagrada Familia (never had time to visit when I was in Barcelona on business) is the way Gaudi and his successors have synthesised so many Iberian traditions into a single building. You call the roof vaults âbrutalâ, and itâs true they are - comparatively - austere. But then the new facade evokes Picasso, while the older one you show is as riotous as the Manueline at the Jeronimos in Lisbon, or the retablo in the Cartuja de Miraflores outside Burgos.
Good and interesting points Mike. I also see some Picasso in the never parts and not just some sort of overloaded Gothicism in the older parts. In the details it is almost Baroque.
⌠and I can´t be so presumptuous that I can take very much of the credit for these pictures because without the Photolab 8 magics, I would just have forgotten about them because before I trew them om Photolab 8 they made no one especially interested and that goes even for me. So this little test of mine really opened my eyes. I think that it might be the case that Deep Prime XD2s might be even more important to RAW-picture we took in the beginning of the digital era 20 years ago than the ones we take today.
This is also a proof of the importance always take pictures in RAW, if you have an interchangable lens camera. You never know what the future brings when it comes to the magics developed over time in our RAW-converters by the developers. I think both myself and others here can see an example that a RAW-converter can be far more important for the technical picture quality over the years than a few marginally faster lenses and taking into account what these lenses use to cost us on the margin, the prices of the converter-upgrades are just peanuts. Still there is always people complaining over the prices :-).
Even I had some years just using JPEG, that I deaply regret today. Avoid doing the same mistakes as I did.
Today I also saw DXO have released a new version of ViewPoint (version 5) and that is fantastic news for all photographers of architecture. Already version 4 (the Reshape-tool) was far beyond what my other converter Capture One manages to handle and to be fair to DXO even the âRetouchâ-tools are really splendid and far better than what CO can offer and probably even Lightroom.
Without that I would never have been able to fix the perspective problems my Sony 24-105mm caused when I used 24mm a lot this spring in Alhambra and in the Granada Cathedral.
I share your view on RAW - as long as DxO continue to support our former gear. Touch wood they will continue. Like you I started out shooting JPEG until I found a RAW converter that worked on linux - I was operating a no-windows policy at the time (I endured too many of its kinderziekte before W10. And so there are several months worth of travel through France, Ireland, and Croatia in 2011 that will never benefit from the noise reduction and other new toys in PL.
Trying out VP5 has reminded me what a good job VP does on auto. If one can (and is prepared to) stand back from the subject, the detail that VP loses in the auto crop is often unimportant enough to avoid complicated manual adjustments.
As for the Alhambra, I confess I copped out. There were so many people (even in February) that I bought one of the DVDs. One of these days I shall go back to Cordoba, too. But thereâs so much of SpainâŚ
Meanwhile, one âautoâ distortion, and one square perspective gets this:
From this:
D6700576.ARW.dop(18.8 KB) and
D6700576.ARW (43.3 MB)
Thanks for your example picture. There was so much to see at Alhambra.
Yes there was a lot of pople even when we were there but still it was possible to take some nice pictures I think. That is the backside of mass tourism. I´m glad I did so much of my travelling between 1971 and 1986 as I did. It was very different then.
Good tip to try auto in VP5. I will test that a little bit deeper. Doing it totally manually is often very time consuming. I think version 5 might be a little smarter than version 4 is. I remembered I spent quite a lot of time correcting my wide-angle lens pictures from Alhambra with the Reshape-tool in version 4.
One thing I find strange with Sagrada Familia is the order in which the different part of the church seem to be built. They seem to have had such a very high focus on all the towers, columns, spiers and pinnacles of the church and every little detail of the facades that they forgot to finish the job of building the churchâs nave and seal it off from weather and wind so they could use it fully out while completing the rest.
Here is a few more pictures showing this very orgy in towers, pinnacles and pillars.
Putting Jesus there on the balkony between two of the big towers almost gives me dadaism vibrations despite I don´t think that was Gaudis intentions but it is like he is sitting there watching the people struggling to finally get it finished. Please enlarge it if you like. This picture also stresses the different looks of the old and new parts of the church might have when it comes to patina but it might also be an effect of the light.
At a first glance the secont picture also shows what seems to be the same towers but they seem to look a lot more worn and older but is that really the case? Isn´t it just the backside of the same towers with the bridge between to towers where Jesus is sitting? You tell me!
I don´t know if these spiers are a part of the old part of the church and I wonder if Gaudi also changed what was built before he took over. Could these spiers for example be examples of modified parts? Isn´t the more worn parts that seems to be the oldest also built in a darker kind of stone? Also the old entrance seems to be built of some sort of red/brownish sandstone and at least some of the new parts seems very light to its color and looks more like limestone.
When I see these pictures I have taken of the highest parts of the church I think I remember that I at that time had an old but pretty good Minolta 70-200mm telezoom. It was a legendary old Minolta AF generation 1 lens that used to be called âthe beer canâ since it reminded about a beer can to its form.
Especially the last picture I think looks surprisingly sharp - at least at a distance. I also have pushed Photolab 8 a bit more than I use to when I have pushed Clear View up to 50 and even uset some Microcontrast too besides a Fine Contrast set to around 35. That is pretty far from my normal comfort zone. Normally I never do that because of the noise these tools use to induce, especially in the blue skies but version 8 seem to be fine with that which is pretty remarkable too.
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Loved that old âBeercanâ!
Me too, what a bokeh.
Your first photo, i.e. Barcelona_2005_0591, is a picture of the south side of the building, AKA the Passion facade.
Your second photo, i.e. Barcelona_2005_0541, is a picture of the north side of the building, AKA the Nativity facade. These towers are not the same as those in your first photo. The north side is more weathered than the south side because the north side was the bit that Gaudi oversaw, it was constructed between 1894 and 1930.
