Picture of the week

New Clairvaux Monastery

Also known as the Temple of the Sacred Stones, this structure has quite a history. This building has been reassembled from limestone blocks taken from the 800 year old structure of Santa Maria de Ovila in Spain. The infamous newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst purchased this building in 1931, shipping it to the West Coast, with plans to reconstruct the building at a mansion he planned in Northern California. Plans later changed as he fell into some tax difficulties with the city of San Francisco, with the stones being dumped in Golden Gate Park as partial payment. In 1994 the Abbey of New Clairvaux was able to gain ownership of these stones from the City of San Francisco (who failed to make use of them), with plans to reconstruct the original structure as it existed 800 years before.  But by then about 30% of the original stones had disappeared by scavengers and thieves. Today the basic framework of this building has been reestablished as shown here with some cinder blocks used in less critical areas to compensate for the lost stones. The interior of this structure and more comprehensive plans of other supporting buildings have yet to be completed due to lack of funding. 

The New Clairvaux Monastery is located in a somewhat remote and unexpected area of rural farmland, outside the town of Vina, about 20 miles north of Chico. I was passing through this area on the way back from a trip to Lassen and decided to make a stop here to see and photograph it up close. 

The picture above was taken via a single exposure using my Canon 5D Mark III with a 17-40mm L-series f/4 wide angle lens, handheld at ISO 800, f/11, and 1/100 second.  On a whim I decided to forego the tripod when exploring the grounds of this monastery in search of this building, as there was some other event going on at the time, and decided a more discrete approach would be best.  During post-processing I then applied some perspective correction to adjust for the wide angle nature of this capture. Given the extreme lighting range I also captured a bracketed sequence (by leaning against the back wall to steady myself) with plans to merge them during post-processing.  Surprisingly, the dynamic range of the 5Dmk3 was sufficiently good to make use of the bracketed images unnecessary, preferring the more photo realistic result of the single exposure versus the HDR result shown here to the right that is based on 3 separate exposures processed with Photomatix Pro, and then reapplying some increased contrast back in Lightroom with the curve adjustment control. 

All content and images are property of Stephen Fischer Photography, copyright 2014.  Last updated: 7/19/2014   ()