Our little congregation was putting together a cookbook and they needed a picture of the church for it.  Since the  book was going to press on Wednesday, I went up early on Monday hoping to get a nice picture of the sunbathed  front of the church.  Good idea.  The sky was clear and promising.  I set up and got shot after shot over a period of several minutes but  it became clear that the right image was not going to be there.  And the patched parking lot in front wasn’t helping either.  Nothing much of interest as far as the light was concerned and the shot was poorly positioned and composed.

Not very interesting view of Church of the Saviour

I’m a fan of Dewitt Jones and one of his dicta at this point would have been “turn around Barry, turn around”!  So I did and that’s when I saw this.

God beam

The church is situated on eight acres of ground and I’m sure I’ve looked back in this area before but there was never anything of interest or, better, anything interesting I was prepared to see.  It would have been difficult to pass up this shot in any case but there was another reason it was important to me.  In a few weeks I would be preaching while our minister was on vacation and I planned a sermon built around the idea of spirit and seeing.  I was looking for shots that I could use.

Religious language is very symbolic since it deals with the transcendent and unimaginable.  It is interesting to a photographer to see how often light is part of the description of the transcendent – ‘Light of the world’, ‘your word is a lamp unto my feet’, etc.  I had thought early on that a picture of a God beam would be a nice addition to the sermon.  And there it was.

We humans always have an agenda.  My ‘front of the head’ agenda that morning had been to get a good shot of the church.  One item in my ‘back of the head’ agenda, that vast pool of hopes, interests, and yearnings we all carry around, was to get a shot of a God beam.  I’m not going to argue that God gave me a present with that shot, the real gifts to me in the present context are the continued existence of Barry Lively and a growing appreciation of what there is to see.

Christians often quote Matthew 3:2 – ‘Repent for the kingdom of God is near.’  For some that can take on an ominous tone;  it is time to straighten out our lives for the end is coming.  A Bible scholar I know said that a better translation than ‘repent’ would have been ‘turn around.’ ‘Turn around for the kingdom of God is near.’  Indeed it was.  And is.

After working the God beam shot I still had to get a picture of the church.  I moved up the parking lot about 200 feet and shot from the other direction.  It was a better composition but the light was still not what I would want so I used a technique called high dynamic range (HDR) where I did the same shot (on a tripod) three times, overexposing, underexposing and exposing as suggested by the auto exposure feature of the camera.  The shots were combined in software to produce this image.

A better picture of Church of the Saviour

The light is still not great but the glow that came from the HDR treatment was nice.  And as it turned out the publisher changed the image from color to black and white.  If I had known that was what they wanted, I might have settled for one of the first shots I took at the original position and converted it to black and white myself.  I’m glad I didn’t know that.  Otherwise there would have been no God beam picture and I might have settled for a poorly composed picture of the church.  If ignorance isn’t really bliss, at least sometimes it is blissful.