During our recent vacation on the Saanich Peninsula my wife and I made a brief visit to Victoria. We spent a couple of hours exploring the waterfront and the inside of the British Columbia Legislature building.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

The outside of the British Columbia Legislature building is stately and formal with well kept grounds.

Parts of the interior of the building are open to the public, including the second floor which is accessed by a stairway that takes you by some beautiful stained glass windows.

The second floor features a number of interesting historical displays. As is often the case when in public buildings, I had to wait for other visitors to leave the various rooms, or time my image captures when they were hidden behind posts.

From a photography perspective I was completely engrossed by the dignified, classic lines of the architecture.

I also loved the elegant, subtle lighting throughout the various hallways and chambers. The subdued lighting caused me to use some quite slow shutter speeds with my Nikon 1 J5.

I was glad that I had practised shooting hand held with my J5 at shutter speeds at 1/30 and below before we left for our trip.

Using a wide angle lens like the 1 Nikon 6.7-13mm, which has an equivalent field-of-view of 18mm to 35mm, can be a bit tricky in terms of creating symmetry in images. I tilted my J5 and held it at various heights to minimize unpleasant angles whenever I could. I did need to use perspective control software to make adjustments to some of the images in this article, including the hallway image above.

I used the flip screen on the J5 to capture the above image, holding my camera pointed straight up at the ceiling, and looking down at the screen.

Even though I needed to shoot my Nikon 1 J5 at ISO-3200 much of the time and use fairly slow shutter speeds, overall I was pleased with the results.

If you enjoy architectural photography, the British Columbia Legislature building is certainly worth a visit.

Technical Note:
All images in this article were captured hand-held in available light using a Nikon 1 J5 and 1 Nikon lenses as noted in the EXIF data. All photographs were produced from RAW files using my standard process of DxO OpticsPro 11, CS6 and the Nik Collection.

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