The Artful Engineer

Making images of architecture is always, at some level, trying to transform someone else’s art into your own, but this seems particularly true when the subject is the interior of St. Peter’s Basilica. On top of that, untold millions of people have been there with a camera before you. With landscape photography, you can always hope for some unique weather and lighting to make your rendition of a common view less so. But there is precious little seasonal lighting variation indoors at St. Peter’s. On this trip, I was primarily focused on enjoying the visit with my family and didn’t do much that wasn’t obvious (at least obvious to me).

In the image above, I only partially corrected the perspective. When you do this in Lightroom (which is the easiest way to go about it) it pinches the bottom of the image together, so you end up with a keystone-like trapezoid. I cropped it to a rectangle (which is the reason the image is a taller-than-usual aspect ratio). I still had a little white space in the lower corners, which I filled by extending the gray columns down. This partial perspective correction was a good compromise—it looks better than the uncorrected original but the full correction pinched the bottom in way too much.

I am not a fan of the Baldachin—the massive dark sculpture right smack in the middle of St. Peter’s. It’s elaborate, certainly, but ugly. Maybe it would look better if it was better lit, but I doubt it. Being so prominent, it is hard to avoid in pictures. Honestly, I wish they would drag the thing into the Vatican gardens. It’s a 100-foot tall eyesore. Adding insult to injury, the massive quantity of bronze required in the early 1600s to build the thing was stripped off the portico of Pantheon, so what is arguably one of the most beautiful structures on the planet—ancient even 400 years ago—was defaced to create this abomination. It feels like the decoration of a rich person who has a lot more money than taste.

The domed ceiling, however, is nothing short of spectacular. It would be great to make a photograph looking directly up at it, but, alas, the accursed Baldachin has that prime spot.

Climbing and descending the stairs in between the inner and outer shells of the dome itself to reach the lantern at the top is a fun adventure. The gradually-flattening incline as you ascend results in some unusual stairs, such as this:

At the top, you are rewarded with this view:

I was a little sloppy with my ISO on the descent, which resulted in this next not-very-stable image of my wife in silhouette. I call this technique UCM: Unintentional Camera Movement. I really like the way this one turned out, despite being an accident.

I am under no illusions that any of these images, other than the last one, are in any way unique. But they hopefully capture some of the joy and wonder I had when visiting this remarkable place. Next time I am in Rome, I’ll put more effort into making some images that are more uniquely mine.