On Assignment: The Solid Rock

by | Jan 31, 2025 | Assignments | 0 comments

It’s not every day that you get to experience the extremes we find in God’s creation. But when the day came for me to film the next Shoot to Serve photo assignment, The Solid Rock, I came face to face with an extreme I had never encountered before!

The Solid Rock idea 1

The first idea that came to mind for fulfilling this assignment was to photograph at a church. In eastern Quebec, there are lots of old, stone churches. I thought perhaps I could see what stonework there was to photograph around the foundation of a church, with spires or glass windows towering upward in the background.

With this in mind, I set off for the most prominent church in town. Like I mentioned in the video, I had seen a really pretty angle of that church from the main road, so I went there to photograph it first.

If you read the assignment details, you will see that the photos need to be vertical so it can be used for the cover of an sheet-music octavo:

Of course, I realized right off that this perspective was nowhere close to what I was envisioning. The extreme cold must have been playing with my ability to think properly. 🙂

I needed to get in close. Much closer! And with a second big church just behind me, I decided to go there next.

It turned out to be a perfect spot to photograph on a super cold day! There was a giant parking lot with no one around, so I had plenty of flexibility to walk around and could return to the car quickly to warm up without having to walk far at all.

And thankfully, there was a beautiful stone walkway leading right up to the front entrance! This was more like I was envisioning. Here’s one of my first shots, lightly processed and with statue of Mary edited out:

Sadly, not only is this photo far from stunning, it really doesn’t serve the purpose of this assignment very well. It’s too cluttered to be much good for a cover design, and I don’t get any “The Solid Rock” vibes.

The stairs need to be emphasized more. So I took another shot half way up the steps and and edited in a way to intentionally deemphasize the background:

Better, but the stairs take up too little of the frame to be of the appropriate prominence. And the editing job isn’t very inviting either.

The first angle (and editing job) was better. And what I needed to do to help out this angle was to blur out the background. And that would be easy to do in-camera! Just photograph the exact same scene at f/2.8 instead of f/16.

But guess what? The thought to do that never entered my mind! I think the cold really was playing with my mind.

So, on the computer, I opened up the “Lens Blur” panel in Lightroom, fiddled around with the settings, and came up with this:

Not perfect, but definitely better.

Converting it to black & white made it stand out even more.

For the first time, I begin to get the sense that this photo could potentially illustrate the song, The Solid Rock. The snow is no longer a distraction, the cords and colored tape have disappeared, the railings, sky, and shadows have all lost their prominence, and we are left with stone steps leading up to the entrance of a church.

I determined this angle was the only one this church had to offer for my first idea, so I headed back to the car.

The Solid Rock idea 2

On the way to the car, I stopped to photograph a second idea: simple “rock” texture.

Bright, side lighting was the perfect angle of light for photographing the texture of the stonework along an exterior wall of the church. This was what I thought to photograph initially:

But I’m glad I also went in super close to photograph the texture of just one of the blocks. Thinking about it in retrospect, “the” solid Rock is not a combination of multiple blocks, but one, single Rock. So, I think this second composition better serves the purpose of this assignment.

I was finished with photographing in sub-zero temperatures, no matter how much the sun may have been warming things up!

Though I wasn’t super pleased with what I had gotten that day, I had enjoyed photographing in the extreme temperature and I figured I could look for photos from my portfolio or keep my eyes open for better illustrations of “The Solid Rock” in other locations over the next few weeks!

Now It’s Your Turn!

What ideas can you come up with to illustrate the hymn, The Solid Rock? To read the hymn lyrics for inspiration, see examples of other octavo covers, and to gather all the information you need to photograph this assignment correctly, be sure to check out the details for The Solid Rock photo assignment here!

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  1. Illustrating Bible Verses with My Rock Collection - Lenspiration - […] my icy venture into sub-zero temperatures to photograph this month’s photo assignment, The Solid Rock. Being away from home,…

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