Shooting inside a historic church with nothing but available light sounds romantic until the sun moves and you're left in the dark. That's where Andrew Banner's video on shooting Wiggenhall Church in Norfolk gets genuinely useful.
Coming to you from Andrew Banner, this immersive video follows Banner through a medieval Norfolk church as he works through the challenges of interior church photography using a mix of available light and a compact Zhiyun M40S LED light. The Zhiyun M40S puts out 40 W of power despite being small and lightweight, and Banner makes a convincing case for why that's more than enough. Each LED has its own Fresnel lens, which concentrates and amplifies the output well beyond what you'd expect from a light that small. When the sun disappeared behind clouds mid-shoot, Banner pulled it out to light the ornate "bee-shaped" hinges on the antique pews, and the results straight out of the camera, no post-processing, look like they were lit in a studio.
Banner spends serious time on the idea of taking photographs "about" things rather than "of" things. The bee hinges, for example, aren't just close-up macro shots. They're framed within the context of the pews they're attached to, some showing the line of the woodwork, others revealing the Gothic cutouts on the adjacent doors. He applies the same thinking to a shot of a peony in a baptismal font, lit from below with the M40S on its lowest setting, with the church's chancel windows blurred softly in the background at f/3.2. Banner himself isn't sure how he feels about that image, and he says so plainly. That kind of honest, mid-shoot uncertainty is rare in photography content, and it's worth paying attention to.
One of the more practical tips Banner makes is about using your viewfinder instead of the rear screen. When you're working in a space full of clean architectural lines, memorial plaques, and competing visual elements, the screen keeps things at arm's length and makes it hard to check the edges of the frame carefully. The viewfinder isolates your view and forces you to look at every corner. Banner also points out the problem with icons and histograms cluttering the live view screen and hiding distracting elements until you're back home reviewing files. It's a simple fix with a real impact on keeper rate. Beyond that, he gets into the practical challenge of shooting repeating shapes, specifically the finials running along the ends of the pews, and how much physical repositioning it takes to give each element its own visual space without letting them overlap. He also mentions briefly that he'll return to the M40S later in the video for another application, and it's a different use case worth seeing. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Banner.
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