Symmetry with a wide angle

Visiting popular tourist destinations is a challenge for photographers because it's often so difficult to get a clean and artistic picture without including other people. One way to deal with that in places like cathedrals and palaces is to concentrate on ceilings. This remarkable interior is the Church of the Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg, Russia. I used a Sigma 14mm f/1.8 lens, and it is a 5-frame HDR composite handheld. To underscore the symmetry of the architecture, it's important to stand dead center in the cavernous room. Only when you do that will the photograph appear balanced and not skewed. My settings were 1/40 (the slowest shutter speed in the HDR sequence), f/5.6 (because I needed a bit of depth of field for the columns in the foreground), and 3200 ISO.