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
Post-editing fun of a quiet church.

This is an active graveyard and church with gleaming white paint and white crushed stone.  All photos were exposure compensated at +1 to +1.5 stops. 

Click for larger view.  Arrow key right for next image

(above) Standard shot. Nikon Z5, Nikor 17-28mm at 24mm
F9, 1/640  ISO 200
Non-HDR, hand-held, polarized
+1 stop over-exposed

In post, I converted to Black & White, and then Infrared.  

Paintshop Pro (PSP), Black and White conversion

PSP, Infrared conversion

PSP, Black and White conversion

More infrared, different people:

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

Color shots, facing North West:

PSP, lightly edited and cropped (NEF conversion)

Wide Angle Views

The 17-28mm f2.8 is my favorite lens.  When I bought the lens, I intended to replace 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.  Photo Editors have plugins to simulate those other techniques.  For example, I would like to learn how to make the image look like a Gelatin print.  PSP is deficient in this area. Your comments welcome.

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