St Anne's Limehouse (1714-30), by Nicholas Hawksmoor
-Added to the Cream of the Crop pool as my personal favorite.
Making a virtue of a necessity here - there are so many trees around this church, that it can be difficult to photograph in summer, but in winter you can just about shoot through the trees, and they create an attractive frame for a building that's sited in a very built-up urban area. I don't know what you'd call this effect - a type of tracery? Whatever, I'm pleased with the result , the slightly eerie bareness of the trees complements the starkness of the architecture. It also helps to hide the large crane to the left of the frame. I think I spent about a quarter of an hour trying to press the shutter just as the sun was being partially obscured by a cloud, thus giving the kind of diffuse light that often seems to provide the most attractive results.
This shot shows up the strong points (and also the weakness) of the camera I normally use. It's a Ricoh GR-Digital compact camera which, unusually for a compact, has a fixed focal-length wide angle lens. This pretty much forced me to shoot from this spot, and meant that I couldn't avoid chopping the tombstones in half. It's got good sharpness across the frame for a compact camera, which shows up the twigs very well. Barrel distortion isn't bad for a wide-angle on a compact camera either (I think it's under 1.5%). I think you can see the slight distortion in this shot, but it adds a bit of drama to the picture.
