This particular schoolhouse is not all that aesthetically beautiful but it serves a very important function in today’s troubled times. The school serves as the food pantry headquarters for the Christ Church at Lowhill, UCC (seen behind the school in this photo). They gather food and help local families in need. I haven’t been able to find any information on when the school was built or the year it stopped operations as a school.

I shot this as five bracketed RAW frames at 1 stop increments and then combined them into an HDR and tone mapped it with the new HDR Efex Pro plugin from NIK Software before converting it to B&W with NIK Silver Efex Pro.

When I shot this building in Forksville, PA back on 3-20-2010, it puzzled me as to what it was. The abbreviated steeple told it was either a former church or two level schoolhouse. Upon further examination I saw that it once had a second doorway on the right side of the front, the outline just being barely visible now. That told me it had to be a church since wooden churches of this size traditionally have two doorways in the front. There was a realtor sign on the front lawn offering the building for sale. I got some second hand information from fellow Flickr member Mac who said the church may have been called the Forksville Methodist Church at one time. The building sits on a small hillside directly across the street from the Forksville Covered Bridge on the corner of Route 154 and Huckle Street.

I shot this as five bracketed RAW frames at .7 stop increments and then combined them into an HDR and tone mapped it with Photomatix Pro before blending in several textures fmro the commercially available texture packs from Distressed Textures to give it a dark, painterly quality.

This is the inside of the Washington Memorial Chapel on the Grounds of Valley Forge Historical Park. The chapel has an active Episcopal congregation in addition to being major stopping point on the Valley forge list of things to see. It stands in remembrance of General Washington and those brave men and women who gave so much to win our freedom in the American Revolution. I’ve shot at the Chapel before but never inside. It’s a beautiful and majestic place.

For more information on the Washington Memorial Chapel, visit their web site. For more information on visiting Valley Forge National Historical Park, check out their web site.

I shot this as seven bracketed RAW frames at 1 stop increments (setup via the Promote Remote) and then combined them into an HDR and tone mapped it with the new HDR Efex Pro plugin from NIK Software. Some post-production work with Topaz Adjust finished it off. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to line things up when shooting with the Sigma 10mm Fisheye lens. It’s a little hard to judge because what you see in the viewfinder is not what you end up with after you do the lens correction in Adobe Lightroom to take the fisheye warping out. It’s going to a little more practice until I can get just the right center point and equal width on both sides figured out.

Going back through my archives, I picked this shot out from my 2-7-2009 trip to the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. This is a perspective from the left side of the church looking up and across to the right side.

For more information on the National Cathedral, visit their web site at www.nationalcathedral.org/

I shot this as seven bracketed RAW frames and then combined them into an HDR with Photomatix Pro and finally, tone mapped that image to create the final product.