Saint Andrew the Apostle Church … I’ve been going through a number of photos taken over last fall while in Italy on business. We had a couple ‘down days’ in Milan and took a day trip to Lake Como with a coworker. It was great to get out of the city and explore a bit before heading to the next stop on our itinerary.

In Lake Como, the church of Saint Andrew the Apostle had these amazing frescoes painted on the ceiling. I had the church pretty much to myself, so I set up my Platypod on the floor with my camera, fiddling with it for about 10 minutes to get everything lined up the way I wanted. I snapped off a couple dozen brackets at different F-Stops and exposures to try and get the colors and light where I wanted them.

The Platypod is amazing for traveling and shooting in spaces that do not allow tripod use. Placing this on the floor gives a stable platform for any DSLR/Mirrorless camera and the level can be adjusted with screw in pins that rest on the ground. A lot of my church images have been captured using this platform.

HDR Image of the ceiling of the Como Chapel outside of Milan Italy
HDR Image of the ceiling of the Como Chapel outside of Milan Italy

The image of Saint Andrew’s was shot with the Sony A7Rii and a Laowa 15mm f/2 zero distortion wide angle lens. This lens has become my go to glass for taking these shots. The lens has amazing clarity and next to do distortion edge to edge for wide angle shots. The only drawback, which really doesn’t matter for this type of work, is it is a manual lens and some of the EXIF data isn’t shared back to the file. So what! With output like this, I’ll take the hit! 😀

I did the post processing in Skylum AuroraHDR and On1 Photo Raw. I use On1 to catalog and edit everything, and when working with HDR I will typically export the RAW file(s) from On1 to Aurora as TIFF files, brining the finished HDR merge back as a PSD into On1. This protects the original RAW files (non-destructive editing) while giving spectacular output like this image of the Church of Saint Andrew the Apostle.


Image’s EXIF Data: (was shot at f/2.8 which is not captured)

  • Camera: ILCE-7RM2
  • Taken: 17 October, 2019
  • ISO: 800
  • Shutter speed: 1/40s

Photo Location:


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John P. Hoke

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Cyber Security Professional, Photographer, Coffee Junkie, Mac Addict, Craft Beer & Whiskey connoisseur, all around curmudgeon and generally sarcastic SOB – Not necessarily in that order.

The opinions expressed on this blog are mine alone and not those of my employer, family, pets, the voices in my head, or anyone else for that matter … hell in an hour they may not be mine either 🙂

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