New photography book shows famous St. Vitus Cathedral in all its glory
A new book has just been released that captures Prague’s famous St. Vitus Cathedral, in remarkable detail. Called St. Vitus Cathedral, The Stone Crown of the Kingdom, it was created by photographer Jan William Drnek and includes photos of places most visitors never get to see.
For three years, Jan William Drnek and his team photographed St. Vitus Cathedral, symbol of Czech statehood and home to the Czech crown jewels, including areas off-limits to the public. They took hundreds of thousands of photos and spent dozens of days high under the vaults, in places where even restorers rarely set foot.
The book they created has more than 360 pages, including several fold-out spreads, revealing the hidden secrets of Czechia’s largest sacred space. Among the many images are striking large-format photographs composed from dozens of individual shots, including a black-and-white view of the cathedral’s façade. Jan William Drnek explains:
“We have one photo where we managed to get the whole cathedral into the viewfinder, but from 180 steps away. These are the kind of composite photos where we can capture something you can’t actually see with the naked eye, because the field of view just can’t encompass it.”
To capture such images, Drnek relies on a well-coordinated team that includes three lighting technicians. They also use a mobile radar app that warns them if rain is approaching.
“We need to find out at what angle the sun is shining, where it rises, and so on, because some things you can do beautifully in June, and then suddenly in September you realize it’s impossible and you have to wait another year, and so on. The same goes if you want to capture, for instance, the projection of the rose window onto the cathedral’s axis.”
Photographing the cathedral in such detail required a wide range of techniques, says Mr. Drnek:
“We shoot using different technologies — either with an excessive number of images, or we shoot some things in series with changing depth of field, which is called focus stacking. Some things, like the Crown Jewels, we photographed using moving light. So you could say we literally paint with light.”
The book is divided into ten thematic chapters, each introduced by a photographic detail from the gemstone decoration of St. Wenceslas Chapel. It is accompanied by texts by architectural historian Petr Uličný, who traces the history of the cathedral back to the beginnings of its Gothic construction in the mid-14th century.
The book is available in both a collector’s and a standard edition. The limited collector’s edition, bound in leather with gilt edges and produced in only 700 copies, costs CZK 17,000. The standard version, priced at around CZK 2,000, is expected to reach bookstores at the end of November.
