Congratulations to Rajesh Jyothiswaran of Murphy, TX, winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest. This is the third time Rajesh has grabbed the Flickr gold. His last win was back in March. He follows last week’s winner, Jochem Herremans of Antwerp, Belgium,

If you would like to participate in the Flickr Photo of the Week contest, all you need to do is upload your photo to our Flickr group page. It’s fine to submit a photo you took earlier than the current week, but we are hoping that the contest will inspire you to go out and shoot something fantastic this week to share with Art&Seek users. If the picture you take involves a facet of the arts, even better. The contest week will run from Tuesday to Monday, and the Art&Seek staff will pick a winner on Friday afternoon. We’ll notify the winner through FlickrMail (so be sure to check those inboxes) and ask you to fill out a short survey to tell us a little more about yourself and the photo you took. We’ll post the winners’ photo on Tuesday.

Now here’s more from Rajesh.

Title of Photo:  “Alluring Olah”

Equipment:

• Camera: Sony Alpha a7R II
• Lens: ZEISS Batis 18mm f/2.8
• EXIF data: 18mm/ƒ/2.8/20s/ISO 5000
• Tripod: 3 Legged Thing Winston
• Wired Remote Shutter Release/Intervalometer to trigger the photos
• Tiny low intensity LED lamps to light up the inside of the chapel

Tell us more about your photo: 

I know there are others including myself that have photographed this stunning Norwegian chapel in Cranfills Gap, TX at night but, I do not recall seeing the telltale green airglow in photos taken here. I have been to the Old Rock Church or St. Olaf Kirke as it is formally known three times before this and my fourth visit is special for what I was able to capture in near ideal conditions. This time even the wispy layers of clouds contributed to the intrigue of the scene in contrast to my previous visit when thick clouds blanketed the skies.

This beautiful late 1800s church sits on top of a hill and has no electricity or running water. So in order to bring out the details, I used tiny low intensity LED lamps that I placed on the floor below the windows. These are so dim that you cannot easily see the light from a distance but worked well for this purpose since I was photographing Milky Way as well which aligned nicely with the steeple.

This has to be one of my more satisfying night photo shoots when everything worked as intended. The unusual airglow was icing on the cake. Night sky is not actually totally dark like most people think. There is color in the stars and the sky itself has color. Airglow comes from emissions of different colors of light from naturally occurring chemical reactions in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The green portion of airglow occurs when light from the sun splits apart molecular oxygen into individual oxygen atoms. When the atoms recombine nearly a 100 km up in the sky, they give off the excess energy as photons in the green part of the visible light spectrum, giving the sky a greenish tinge.