About

This is Ecclesiarum (Churches), an offshoot of my principle blog at stephenhip.wordpress.com .   I decided to create this blog to concentrate my interest in photographing churches in one place – it was becoming disjointed on my main blog.

Why do I spend so much time photographing churches? – Simply because I find them fascinating.  They are about people.  Of course, they have been built for a particular purpose, but individuals built them, craftsmen, artists, laypeople have come together to create, modify and adapt a building to meet their religious needs – and this can be over a period of as much as a 1000 years (maybe more).  From the stone work of the structure, the intricate carving of details, the creation of wall paintings, the heart felt dedication on memorials down the ages, through to the needlework of the covers of hassocks and the welcome of the ‘Sunday School’ corners and information desks.  Humanity.

I often like to photograph less obvious detail in the churches I visit, perhaps it’s a simple play of light, or evidence of casual human activity, maybe something forgotten in a corner or a cobweb or two in at an unreachable height – these I include in a final section called ‘Incidentals’ on each page. On an associated point, you may find some of my images a little dark or the image seems an obvious candidate for HDR, this could be a valid point but my approach tends to be one that attempts to capture the underlying atmosphere of the locations rather than necessarily giving a precise record of what’s there.  You may also feel some of the images show differing light qualities between them, this is very likely to be down to the fact I have visited on different days.  One of the joys of ‘big window’ locations is the huge differences time of day and weather conditions can make to subjects.

If I have photographed more than a couple of stain glass windows, or some other subject I may pull these into a child-page – just alleviate the need to download huge pages of images.

I’m no expert on churches, architecture or history so I very much rely in research using books and the web – I’ve included a child-page giving the main references I’ve used, including links to useful web sites – whose owners are clearly more knowledgeable than I am!

I will use a separate page for each church and posts to advertise that I’ve made an  addition or made a significant update to an existing page.  I’ll also use posts to ‘cherry pick’ specific images.

——-Stephen G. Hipperson——–