June 17th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

Church Silhouette 24mm f9 @ 1/250 ISO 400

Sometimes you fail to achieve what you were looking for, but come up with something else you love.  This past Sunday,  the sky was doing awesome ray of light stuff through the clouds. I have had my eye on this little church, hoping to make a cool frame for a while, so I decided to drive over and see if the sky would do something nice for me behind it.  The pretty rays of light were nowhere near where they needed to be to get the image I was hoping for, so I set up on a tripod  with the Sun directly behind the church, and started bracketing exposures, thinking maybe I would use them for my first crack at HDR.  When I got home…..  and started playing with the image,  I realized that the underexposed images were actually really neat, so I started playing with them.  I came up with this with a bit of a crop, and shifting the color temperature to gold a bit.  The final image was totally not what I was looking for, but I am defiantly happy with the result.  There is absolutely zero detail, but you just know exactly what you are looking at.  The lessons here are twofold:  first off,  even if you cant get the image you want, you might still make something that works.  Secondly,  bad weather might mean good photos.  It had been rainy and nasty, and these left over clouds when it got sunny totally make the picture.