Back in the Cathedral with the Choir

[billtils]

In 2017 I agreed to take some photographs of a local Choir, the Rosenethe Singers, at their annual Christmas concert given in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.. It began as a one-off but it didn't quite end up that way and from 2018 on I was the choir's photogapher at their winter and spring concerts in Dunblane Cathedral. You-know-what meant that there were no concerts from Winter 2019 until last week and this post is a brief catch up on the day.

There were two pieces on the progam, Poulenc's Gloria and David Fanshawe's African Sanctus. The former is not one of my favourites but I could have listened to the soprano soloist (Belinda Evans) all day and happily she featured in the Fanshawe too. The set up for the Poulenc was photographically interesting as the accompaniment was from the Cathedral's mighty organ, the keyboard for which is in the "Choir" area of the building and not visible from the Nave (see the Virtual Tour page in the web link) where the conductor and actual choir were located. The photographs of the organ(ist) were taken during rehearsal, with the D810 in manual mode with Auto ISO and (just for fun) with the 100mm manual focus Zeiss. It was pretty gloomy in there but I chose not to use flash so as not to distract the organist.

Almost all of the photographs shot during the concert were taken with the D810 + Nikon 20-200 F/4 in manual mode and remote trigger. Some show what is obviously a projector screen - you can read about Fanshawe's life and work here and we had the honour of the presence of his widow Jane during the concert and she provided slides that fitted in to the musical narrative.

The workflow was raw development and library using CaptureOne Pro, Healing and Cloning where required in Affinity Photo and noise reduction also in AP.

1: The organist





2: How he sees the conductor





3: The Choir




4: The soloists - percussion






5: The Soprano