St. John the Evanelist Church, North Boulder Valley MT

Saint John the Evangelist Catholic Church, North Boulder Valley (Boulder), Montana, USA
Montana State Highway 69
August, 2025

This is an active graveyard and church with gleaming white paint and white crushed stone.  The church itself was closed on the day we visited.

Post-editing fun of a quiet church.

Click for larger view.  Arrow key right for next image

(above) Nikon Z5, Nikor 17-28mm at 24mm
F9, 1/640  ISO 200
+1 stop over-exposed (no grey-card; estimated)
Polarized
Non-HDR, hand-held, no tripod

Because of the white church and the white gravel in the graveyard (there is no grass), all photos were exposure compensated at +1 to +1.5 stops.

In post, I converted to Black & White, Infrared.  Infrared is always intriguing.

Paintshop Pro (PSP), Black and White conversion

PSP, Infrared conversion

PSP, lightly edited and cropped (NEF conversion)

PSP, Black and White conversion

More infrared, different people:

Different view.  PSP, Infrared Conversion.  17mm, F9

Wide Angle Views

The 17-28mm f2.8 is my favorite lens.  When I bought the lens, I intended to replicate a 20mm from my film cameras, but time-and-time again, the zoom finds itself at 17mm.  The change from 20 to 17 is loads-of-fun. 

The lens does not like to look up, as evidenced in the front facade's keystone.  Results were laughable when I tried to correct the perspective in the editor.  Clearly, I do not know how that tool works.  Of the two exposures taken, both were artistic failures.  Yes, this was all visible in the view finder, but I clicked the button anyway.

Keystoning, galore.  17mm

The wide-angle graveyard photos were a success.  With these, look at the center of the frame -- the horizon is lurking near-by.  

With wide-angle shots like these, cropping is needed if the foreground details are bland.  In this particular photo, I was only a few scant feet away, with the lens trending-down.  I was watching the distortion on the headstones near the center, keeping them more-or-less natural looking.  But the headstones on the far-left (now cropped), were distinctly leaning backwards.  

The goal was to make the church seem small and to give distance between the headstones.  All things a wide-angle loves to do.

Click for larger view

 

After illustrating the cropping marks, I noticed the brilliantly-white outhouse along the right-edge of the frame garnering too-much attention and it needed to be dodged.  On my first attempt, the dodging brush was too wide, darkening near-by foliage, and this can be seen in this illustration (click to enlarge).  The outbuilding looked smudged, like an out-of-focus blob.  It took a second edit to fix this.

Of interest, several of the photographs were taken in-camera, as B&W.  When looking through the Z5's electronic view finder, the composition was fantastic, showing the scene in monochrome.  It is exhilarating to take photographs this way.

However, since I always store the original negatives as .NEF, they were full color when pulled-up in the editor.  Vaguely disappointing, but easily changed back.

Finally, Paint Shop Pro's B&W conversion seems flat.  In the real world, there are different kinds of black and white films and printing papers.  Editors often have plugins to simulate those other techniques.  For example, I would like to learn how to make the image look like a Gelatin print.  Alas, PSP is weak in this area. Your comments welcome.

Related articles:
Using an 18% greycard:
https://imageliner.blogspot.com/2011/11/using-18-grey-card.html