Seeing through the negative

Salvation Army, Christchurch City Corps.

The church was only two or three years old; it replaced one lost in the 2011 earthquakes. Last week we were attending the funeral of my Mother-in-law - Jeane Prattley. The picture above doesn't do it justice, but the cross at the front of the auditorium dominates the space as soon as one enters. 

Only it doesn't. There is no cross. What appears as a cross is simply an absence of wall, filled with glass to keep out the elements. When you look at the cross, you see mostly sky; dull and grey or, as on the day of the funeral, blue with fluffy white clouds passing by. The cross is an illusion; one that even the partially-sighted can't fail to notice.

Later, as six of us carried Jeane's casket to the hearse, we each became acutely conscious of her absence. Jeane was no longer with us. And yet it seems to me that, in embracing the fact of Jeane's absence, she comes more clearly into focus. Like that cross, there is now a Jeane shaped hole in the fabric of life; it is by looking at that absence that we can, perhaps, still perceive the presence.

My kinda church

Recently, in an online faith community I frequent, there has been much discussion on the subject of church attendance. Perhaps surprisingly for an online community, the vast majority of participants are committed church attendees, a number being actively involved in the life of their churches well beyond basic Sunday attendance. I have been like that too. But part of the discussion included this blog post in which the writer promotes the view that it's not possible to be a Christian unless you regularly go to church. Allow me to disagree.

But, before I disagree, it must be said that there are ideas about being a Christian and what church is that do support that blog writer's point of view. If by 'church' you mean an institutional church and if by 'Christian' you mean a member of an institutional church then, of course, Christianity and church attendance are inextricably entwined. But, I submit, Christianity is not an institutional thing, it's about a person, an individual we call Jesus Christ, and to be a Christian is nothing more nor less than being a follower of Jesus Christ.  'Church,' in this context is the universal fellowship of Christian believers and not the building down the road.  In this understanding, we create a serious problem if we attempt to make being Christian dependent on institutional church attendance.

Of course, none of that precludes church attendance. But it does tell us that our Christianity can't be confined to a church nor defined by our attendance at a church.  Christianity is a lived faith, not an institutionalised belief system. At its core, Christianity is a faith where our relationship with God is mediated by only one person - the Christ who makes us Christian (and not only in language terms). Where the institutional church and its professional clergy do have an important role to play, is in guiding us flock of Christians towards a spiritually mature participation in the Kingdom of God. Historical power structures may have made it otherwise in the past but here, in the twenty-first century, the institutional church must take up the role of servant-guide and foot-washer if it is to avoid a slide into irrelevance. (I loved that the Pope modeled this over Easter.)

And here's the thing; you couldn't keep me away from a church that was interested in helping me and everyone else to become better at this Christian thing. Not better Anglicans or Catholics, not better Baptists or Pentecostals, nor better Methodists or Adventists (the list goes on) - just better Christians, lovers of God and our fellow human beings. Religious dogma doesn't fix social injustice, it doesn't heal the sick nor bind up the broken hearted. I need to know how to pick up my cross and carry it as Christ said I should. Where is the church that's more interested in those things than the state of its roof, the sex of its ministers or whether the weekly tithe will cover the bills? Take me to that church.

Andorran time traveler

I always have trouble locating Andorra; for some reason my brain keeps telling me that Andorra is in the Andes, whereas it is actually several thousand miles away in the Pyrenees.  Andora is a lovely place marred only by the fact that it has basically one road and, in the summer, ten million tourists - which makes for a permanent traffic jam through the capital, Andorra la Vella.

Anyway, I found this slide of Sant Joan De Caselles in Canillo. When I visited in the mid 1970s it was a rather unkempt building stuck on a hillside and calling out for a little TLC. None the less, it was a beautifully rugged example of Romanesque architecture and well worth a picture.

Fast forward forty years and have a look at this link: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/73596078. The same church now stands in its own pristine grounds alongside a modern highway with its own car-park and what looks like hotel accommodation. Absolutely wonderful - even if the stone wall in the foreground has gone and it's not as beautifully rugged as I recall.

By the way, my fading brain cells had forgotten where I had taken the picture. But, by throwing the picture into Google image search, it was easy to verify the building and its location. Google; the poor man's Tardis.

Holy Innocents

Out the back of Amberley there is a rather pretty church - an ideal location to check out the latest lens - a Nikkor 18-35mm. I bought it with a view to moving up to an FX camera later in the year so right now it's an FX lens on a DX body which has the distinct advantage of cropping out a lens' most vulnerable areas - the corners. On the D80 I'm getting excellent sharpness right across the frame - even wide open. Nice.

Fractals as texture

As a casual diversion from photography, I sometimes dabble in fractal art. Occasionally a fractal makes it into a photograph as a background to a portrait, but recently I have been toying with fractals as texture. Let me demonstrate:

I'll use the fractal below. It's shown here on a black background so it can be seen easily, but the actual fractal was brought into the photo file as a transparent png (no black). This fractal is suitable because (a) it is soft and lacking in hard edged definition (b) it has a nice warm color.

The image I will use is a straightforward church interior with lots of wood that will go nicely with the warm tones of the fractal image.

The settings used for the texture layer were mode=overlay and opacity about 50%, settings which produced this final picture:

Apologies that the last picture is smaller (Blogger changes it to the original if I try to make it any larger!) What I like about this approach is that it replaces a warming filter, the different shades in the fractal give very subtle changes in luminosity that make the picture more three dimensional, and while its effects are quite visible the fractal its self isn't.

The fractal was generated in Apothysis 7x (a freeware program) and picked out of a randomly generated batch (i.e. no skill whatsoever required :-)

All around view

It's been a week of experiments with interactive 360 degree photography. It started with a client wanting a 360 degree view of their retail space and ended up with visiting St Michael and All Angels church to see what could be done with a larger interior. The results can be seen at http://www.fords.co.nz/pano/stmichael/start.html. If you do try the link, use the 'full screen' button to see it at large scale; well worth it.

The interior was taken with six fish-eye frames - 5 horizontal and 1vertically upward. I could have taken a seventh vertically downward but didn't bother this time so there is a small black hole in the floor underneath the camera! The six pictures were stitched using 'Hugin' and the virtual reality files were created using 'Pano2VR'.

The resulting image files are quite large to download but the additional quality for zooming in on detail is worth the short wait. The image will display in a browser using either 'Flash' or 'HTML5' if Flash isn't available. Comments welcome.