The Church of the Remarkable Lady

One of the first posts I wrote, a while ago, was about a most remarkable lady I met outside a church in Suzdal. If you haven’t done so already, I urge you to go read that post, because it contains a very significant, very Russian real story. Today, as I was looking through my photos for new blog posts, I actually found a picture I took that very same day, inside of the church.

This is Успенская церковь, or Church of the Assumptionon on Kremlin Street. On the outside it is painted in dark red, with white edges that underline the original, irregular architecture. The church as we see it has developed over a few centuries, with the original wooden structure completely burned and rebuilt a few times over. The official date of construction is 1719. The most recent restoration dates to 1958 when the whole inside and a good part of the outside were practically rebuilt in Naryshkin baroque style.  Successive restorations kept in the exceptional good shape you see it in today, with the downside that everything looks very, very “new” and this, to tame, takes something away from the magic atmosphere of an old Orthodox church.

Photographically, I shot this picture with a super-super wide angle (12mm on full frame). One of my dreams is to one day get a fast f2.8 12mm, but for now I am pretty happy with my old variable aperture 12-24mm zoom from Sigma. Going so wide allowed me to shoot hand-held at 1/15th of a second, so that I did not have to raise the ISO too much (this picture is taken with a Nikon D700). Keeping the ISO in check also allows to light up the shadows in post (while, at least with Nikon cameras, in my experience, there is very little margin in recovering blown highlights, as you see in the windows). There is actually very little post-processing done to this photo. I tried to keep my camera as level as possible when shooting, but of course the distortion correction in Adobe Lightroom greatly helped to get all vertical lines both straight and truly vertical.

Would you lake to take part in a photo walk or a photo tour in Suzdal and the other magical cities of Russia’s Golden Ring? Do get in touch and we’ll be happy to organza an unforgettable, tailor-made experience for you!