Why would an atheist go to church?

Don't worry, I'm not going to go all religious - or antireligious here. The point I'm trying to make is that regardless of religious conviction, a beholder of a architectural praise to the transcendent powers, will see something made with love and awe. Sure, you can find that love and awe outside of churches and mosks and temples, sure - but the point is non the less that it's almost sure to be found in the buildings raised to praise the unearthly, while it's far from sure in a ton of other buildings and structures. Or do you see this kind of symbolism in your neighbor's garage or at the children's school down the road?

The architectural praise is something worth trying to capture with your camera, something to hunt for in the photos of a church, mosk, synagogue or temple - if you find it there to begin with.

I went with a friend out on Jæren today, to a place called Orre. There we found Orre Old Church hanging around on it's usual spot - a building from ca 1250, a so called "long church". 

It is called a long church because of its long room in the middle, that symbolize the holy road (“Via Sacra”), from the west towards the sunrise in the east. This was the most common type of church buildt from the middle ages until the 20th century in Norway.

I had my 60mm macro lens hooked to the camera, and in the cold north wind I really didn't want to start to change lens. In addition I had just downloaded a free stitching program I happened to stumbled upon on the net, Autostitch. That made me want to make a panorama-image of the church in stead of struggling over barbed fences and trafficked roads to get to a distance where I'd get the whole church in view. So -  I set the camera to an appropriate M setting and shot ten images of the church, five at the bottom, five at the top, clockwise. 

After that I thought "if it works, then it works, and if it doesn't then I'll go back another day when the sky is blue and bring my wide-angel lens mounted on teh Camera". 

The windy walk around the white chalked old stone chapel might have stirred some biblical neurons in me mind. On the way home I shopped some groceries and happened upon the most tempting and delicious looking Argentinian Apples, four of those please!

And if the temptation of apples is hard to believe in, just look at this lot.

While the tempted struggled not to bite into the fruit, I stitched and stitched and ... to be honest Autostitch did all the stitching for me. And this is what came out:

Magic that a program can throw together ten loose images to this, right? Well I have copped it and done a little photoshopping, to be honest. But not much, nothing much indeed. 

Still, I was not pleased with the mood the image gave, it was to light, to bright, to ... realistic maybe. I tossed and turned and churned it a few rounds in Lightroom, until this image showed:

And then I was pleased and ... ate an apple!