Christuskirche: architectural photography in Rome, Italy

Case Study: Photographs of the new lighting installation for the architectural spaces of  the Lutheran Evangelical church in Rome, Italy

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For this architectural photography assignment, the client – architect Del Bufalo / Auralight – required a color faithful photographic representation of both pre and post renovation state of The Christuskirche, a Lutheran Evangelical church in Rome, Italy built between 1910 and 1922 under direction of architect Franz Heinrich Schwechten. The architecture is said by various accounts to be the most opulent Evangelic church of all times. Evangelic churches are indeed best known for their sober and linear design.

The project of the Architect consists in a LED installation that replaced the outdated and unreliable metallic iodide lamps. The new device mounts ( wallwashers, floodlights and spotlights) now illuminate the interior spaces and the mosaics on the vaults, archways and the apse. Different lighting scenes are programmable with a handy app. The new neutral and uniform color temperature helps to faithfully render the colors of the pieces of the mosaic and marble slabs.

After having taken photographs of the poor lighting setup of the pre-renovation stage, I waited a couple of weeks for the construction works to complete and continue with the assignment, shooting the architecture under the light of the newly installed lamps. A simple referenced planning of the shooting helped to retrace the base points, useful to obtain later the same framing along the entire set of photographs.
In order to get an optimal wide field of view, on some frames I used the shifting feature of the lens and a parallax sliding track corrector to grab multiple shots in one take and recompose them together later on. The zenithal projection (first two photos) of the main vault is the most significant example of what the stepping shift technique is capable of.