WISCONSIN STATE CAPITOL, AGAIN

The Wisconsin State Capitol is, in my experience, architecturally outstanding, and I have photographed it at least a half dozen times.  I was in the Madison area this past Sunday and took the opportunity to photograph it once more, using my new wide-angle lens.  Here is what I got.

I took a few obligatory shots of the exterior, but my primary interest was of the ornate interior.

I was looking forward to shooting the dome interior from directly below, but the above shot reveals that there was an exhibit occupying the center of the rotunda. Grrr.  So I did the best I could, positioning myself as close to the center as possible and shooting handheld.

A careful examination reveals that the shot is just a bit off-center.  I could have gotten a bit more "reach" by setting the camera directly on the rotunda floor.  Even so, I was happy with the results, considering that it was handheld and I had to shoot at a relatively high ISO to avoid camera shake.  For the record, this was shot at an ISO of 2500 at f/5.6 for 1/200 second.  Perhaps it was the complexity of the image, but I thought the amount of noise present in the shot was really quite low, considering the ISO.  Because of the nature of the lens (wide-angle) it has greater depth of field at a given aperture, and that shows in these images, as the resolution is very crisp, though that may not be apparent in the lower quality images that I post online.

Here are a couple more shots that featured the dome area.

There is some lens distortion, which I anticipated, but perhaps the shots are interesting as semi-abstracts.

Here is another photo taken from the third level, which illustrates the lens's wide-angle reach, as the opening above the rotunda begins to look like a hole at the second floor level.  This was taken at the lens's widest focal length of 15 mm.

Finally, I liked the following shot that I doctored a bit in post processing to reduce perspective distortion.

John