Final Single Post

This is my final post prior to getting married on Saturday. Here's the program I designed for the ceremony (well the cover of it anyway).

Haven't had time to tend the blog and web site lately, but I will blog it up really right again next month.

Cheers!

Last Millvale Mural Post

One last group of shots to share of the Millvale murals. What I couldn't figure out is what kind of paint the artist used. The docent didn't mention it and I didn't have time to ask. It's obviously not oil, and it wasn't a fresco so I'm thinking some kind of acrylic. In any case, visiting these murals gave me a sense of what it must be like to see some of the great churches in Europe. I hope someday to make it to some of them. As I was with this church, I'll probably be surprised to see how small some of them are. The Sistine looks big on the TV screens but everyone I know that has visited it says they were surprised to see the actual size of it.

Church Photo Fun

Here's an example of the fun I like to have composing and processing photos. While visiting the church murals last week in Millvale, after our docent ended her talk, Linda was sitting there just taking it all in. I positioned myself a few pews behind her and took some shots toying with the depth of field between her and the Virgin Mary statue. I took about twelve different shots. After reviewing them all in Bridge, I decided on the top one as the best. Using the CS4 version of camera RAW and photoshop I was able to get a better crop, push color, tweek blur, direct light and selectively sharpen, to come up with the image below. Kind of works well as a composition. I can't remember if I was shooting RAW or JPG at the time. I'd have to check the metadata of the shot in Bridge. Oh well, that's all for today.

Millvale Murals

Well as promised here are some shots of the murals at St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in the Millvale section of Pittsburgh that my Linda and I went to see on Saturday. Pretty impressive stuff. The most striking image to me (partially because it's the first thing you see as you enter) was the top shot here of the Madonna and child that is painted on a large dome that rises above the altar. She is obviously not the virgin Mary from central casting that you see in so many church paintings and statues around here. This virgin is heavy and full-faced. She has done hard work as have the Croatian Catholic immigrants that this church was built for. Just about all the images were rich with allegory and meaning that the parishioners of the day could identify with. The docent that spoke about the murals was really good, and she had grown up going to this church at the time the artist, Maximilian Vanka was painting them, so we really felt a connection with the murals.

I was surprised at how small the church was. Of course being in Millvale how big could it be?! We don't have a GPS and the directions in the local paper weren't very helpful. It was very beautiful though once we found it. Before I forget, I wanted to post a link about the murals and how you can visit and support the restoration efforts so here it is.

More shots to come next time...