Picture Tales: Sacred Places - Image 01

This church is situated on the edge of the famous caldera on the island of Santorini, Greece, in a spot well-known to photographers. The church itself is beautiful mainly for its simplicity, its colourful dome and its location. However there is only one place from which a view of the bell-tower and the dome can be obtained without background clutter. I spent some time searching the narrow alleyways of the town before finally emerging onto the correct roof-top.

I used a polarising filter to intensify the blue of the dome and darken the water almost to black. In such situations it is easy to overdo the polarisation, so I rotated the filter slightly away from the maximum polarisation position. The exposure was taken largely from the a spot reading on the blue dome, because a matrix measurement would have been heavily influenced by the glaring white walls. I bracketed either side of the chosen exposure to ensure that no detail was not lost in the white walls, and that there were recorded as white rather than grey.