When I posted the photos of the views from the ruins of the Church of St. Nicholas in Hamburg a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t have a photo of the full facade of the church to show you.  However, I discovered that the day after I took those photos, I did take two more photos of the church that, when stitched together, provide a view of the bell tower, top to bottom.  I took these photos while standing in the empty plaza that’s now in front of the tower. The plaza is in the open-air now, but it’s where the interior of the church once stood.

Anyway, I stitched the two photos together to form a “vertical panorama” of the ruins of the church:

Ruins of the Church of St. Nicholas, Hamburg

Does that sky look a little odd to you? It does to me. But I did not deliberately change anything in the photo to make that sky so overwhelming uniform — it was really just a completely cloudy day, with not a thing to see in the sky. A cloudy and yet cloudless day. I’d call it a clear day, but that conjures up a scene of a blue sky in my mind. So, what to call this – perhaps a clearly-cloudy day?

Oddly, when I look at that photo that blank sky looks artificial to me – we don’t get many of these clearly-cloudy days here in Tübingen, I guess.

I mention this because lately I’ve been playing a lot with photos in my “digital darkroom”, and have discovered that there are ways in which to bring out more of the clouds in even a seemingly dull sky. But in this case for the photos from this day in Hamburg, there was really nothing there in the sky, at least nothing that I could see in person, and also nothing that my “digital darkroom” programs can see.

Compare that sky with the cloudy one in the photo below that I’d taken the day before of just the top of that same steeple:

Steeple of the Church of St. Nicholas, Hamburg

The clouds patterns in this photo were there in real life. I have adjusted the contrast and light a bit to emphasize the light around the steeple, of course. But the clouds are all original – they were brought out in the darkroom to show that it was an indeed a cloudy sky full of clouds.  Although I hadn’t thought about this before, as I looked at these photos, it seemed obvious that English is in need of some term that captures the difference in the skies on these two days. I proposed clearly-cloudy and cloudy-cloudy. Other suggestions welcome.

Anyway, in the lower left of the first photo you might be able to spot a statue that is actually quite tall, but dwarfed when viewed next to the steeple. It’s a statue to peace; the Church of St. Nicholas has actually been left in ruins since WWII as a memorial to all the victims of the war, on all sides.

My photo of the statue is below. Clearly, it was not taken on a clearly-cloudy day. 😉

Statue dedicate to Peace, St. Nicholas Church ruins, Hamburg