About the middle of last week, I started thinking about a plan I'd hatched to go down to San Antonio and spend a day driving up the Mission Trail and photographing San Antonio's Spanish missions. Now, considering how poorly my last photo Safari turned out - shooting the super moon and lunar eclipse - I decided to spend more time on my preparation. That meant finding the National Park Service maps of the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park and whatever other details I could suss out to ensure a satisfactory outcome.
The missions generally follow the San Antonio River upstream towards the heart of the city. Beginning with Mission Espada, the Trail leads the tourist or photographer from there to Mission San Juan Capistrano, Mission San José, Mission Concepción, and Mission San Antonio de Valero which is, of course, the Alamo. Stopping in the center of town, the Mission Trail kind of left me hanging. After all, I still had to drive back to Austin. Was there anywhere else I needed to shoot since I was already down here? Brackenridge Park Zoo is around here somewhere; I could spend the afternoon there, maybe stop and see Ellen on the way out of town, avoid traffic and get home via Marble Falls and - voilà - a very productive day by any measure.
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| Founded in 1690 as San Francisco de los Tejas, 40 years later when the Spanish frontier was retreating from the Nacogdoches region back to San Antonio, the missionaries and soldiers associated with the mission were transferred to a site near the San Antonio River and the mission renamed San Francisco de la Espada. |
Now, taking the basic plan, it's time for some tweaking. I've already been to the Alamo several times and, even though it's Friday and school is back in session, I decided out of hand that I could do without the crowds and traffic that I suspect still teem about the Alamo Plaza. I launched Google Maps and Google Images and started my reconnaissance. Mission Espada has some real promise, but most of the images I found concentrated on the chapel and the bells in its façade. Google Maps, with great foresight, sent a hiker through the missions with his backpack-mounted Street View camera, so I was able to see just about this whole portion of the park. Ruins of the mission walls seemed very photogenic, but my first impression was right on. Unless I was looking for a place to shoot great portraits, all my pictures here were likely to be of the chapel.
Okay, Mission Espada was a possibility. Upstream a bit and on the other side of the river I checked out San Juan. The situation there was similar to Espada - all the images would be concentrated on the chapel. While many of the images I found online showed promise, for some inexplicable reason the NPS whitewashed the chapel and the connected wall. Thinking about it, I suppose they whitewashed the portions of the mission that were satisfactory from a structural point of view while they restore and repair other sections. Not really inexplicable after all, but not what I want to shoot either.
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| Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, known as the "Queen of the Missions", is the largest of the missions and was almost fully restored to its original design in the 1930s by the Works Projects Administration (WPA). |
On to Mission San José. The Street View images of San José told me
immediately that this would be where I'd spend most of my time. It was
wide-open with oak and mesquite trees providing some shade in the
courtyard. The main buildings, the chapel and convento stand out with a
belltower and dome, each capped with a wrought iron cross, beautiful
arches, carved stone details. Exactly what any photographer would be
searching for. The courtyard itself was bounded by walls for protection
from the wild Indians. The walls incorporated quarters, small rooms which
the padres would no doubt have referred to as cells, for the Indian
residents. The stonework here seems to be largely done, and the Park
Service repair work is concentrating on details such as arbors and the
like. From what little reading I did, I suspect there is some
archaeological work still going on, probably associated with local
universities. All of it is laudable work, well carried out.
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| The bell tower on the western corner of the main church building. Note the carved stone detail on the tower and the surrounding the rose window on the southwestern wall as well as the wrought ironwork. |
My impression of San José was that there was plenty here to keep me busy
all morning, and enough detail to stretch into the middle of the
afternoon. All the mission sites have hours of 9am -5pm. However, San
José had gates which the signs said would close at 5pm and presumably
stay closed till 9am. On the other hand, possibly because the walls
themselves were ruins, Mission Espada had no gates - yet. The idea was
forming in my mind that I would drive down from Austin to Espada to
shoot that mission shortly after sunrise, have a breakfast burrito on
the way to San José, and be there when the gates opened at 9am. Good
plan, Parker.
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| The belltower and the dome over the transept mark the church (left) are joined to the convento, which housed the Spanish residents of the mission. Native residents' quarters were located within the compound along the perimeter wall. |
Next up, Mission Concepción. Absolutely beautiful. My first impression
of Concepción is that the church has been in continuous use for the last
300 years. The big difference between it and San José though, is that the
portions of the mission no longer necessary to provide sanctuary from rampaging Indians apparently had been removed as they fell to ruin and there
is no visible sign, except possibly to a trained archaeologist, that
Concepción is anything other than a 300-year-old church located in the
middle of a beautiful park. That's certainly not to say that it's not
worth visiting. I just decided that I'd save my visit to Concepción for a
photography side trip next time I'm in San Antonio to see Ellen and
Stan, ideally around sunset.
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| Sleeping quarters in the convento were on the second story, above storerooms, offices and common rooms. |
The missing part of this plan turned out to be unnecessary anyway. The part where I visit Ellen and Stan on the way out of town wasn't going to happen because Ellen and Stan were off in Washington DC or North Carolina on vacation. That pretty well established my agenda. Shoot Mission Espada in the early morning light, get to San José by 9am, take as much time as I wanted there and, if I still had enough energy, I'd spend the afternoon at the zoo; if not, I'd head on home in plenty of time for dinner. I programmed my gps with two route options after San José. Only thing left was to decide what day to go.
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| This panoramic view looking south shows the southern end of the convento with a well in the foreground, the mission's south gate, and the first few of numerous rooms for native residents around the perimeter of the mission. |
In the event, I decided Thursday night that I'd go down Friday morning. I spent the evening with my Canon users manual, familiarizing myself with autoexposure bracketing [AEB] so I could shoot some HDR images. Then I got sidetracked when I thought of something that had given me trouble the week before with the super moon and a lunar eclipse. I didn't resolve anything, but when I gave up on it I failed to leave my camera settings ready for the next morning. Ergo, on arrival at Espada my camera was misbehaving and I didn't know whether I was getting any usable shots or not. I probably only spent 15 minutes there before deciding to drive to San José and troubleshoot the camera in the mission parking lot. That way, assuming I figured out what was wrong and how to fix it - neither of which was a given - I'd be ready when the gates opened at 9. The troubleshooting was successful and I managed to figure out how to release the mirror, which had been locked up the night before when I was checking out procedures for time exposures. As well as I could tell from the small LCD screen on the camera, the pictures I took at Espada seemed to be in reasonable focus, nicely composed, and well lit. I'd have to check when I've uploaded them to the computer at home.
I'm nearly done here. I think I'll tell this tale in one post interspersed among half a dozen images. Then tomorrow I'll post another half dozen possibly with captions but with no need for a narrative. As it turned out, I didn't take any HDR shots but the morning at San José was so enjoyable, I'm currently planning to return specifically for HDR shots. Maybe I'll visit Concepción on that trip. Always remember that indecision is the key to flexibility.
Back to San Antonio and Mission San José. The view above of the church and convento is probably my favorite from the whole collection of pictures I took last week. I know it's similar to one of yesterday's pictures, but the composition is so compelling that similar shots kept showing up throughout the day's batch. I like the crispness and the intensity of the colors. The play of the shadows on the convento arches is very dramatic.
This shot turned out much better than I had expected because of the great lighting. The dome and the belltower would have been in deep shadow had the sunlight not been reflected by the opposite side of the wall. I think the result gives an ethereal quality missing in the other images. When I return, I hope I'll be able to remember to take advantage of the effect.
Similar to one of yesterday's shots, what I was trying to catch here was the cylindrical section of the building where the door and window are. It looks to be pretty beat up, but the architectural detail, like the carved stone and the arches and the gothic windows and the wrought ironwork all add to the marvelous design of this complex.
Here's another shot emphasizing the arches and the shadows. It's hard to see much detail in the stone carvings surrounding the door, but they're really impressive. When I first saw this image, my first thought was to return to the mission and go through with my plan to shoot High Dynamic Range. HDR is sometimes overused because some of the effects can be so surrealistic. It should be remembered that the whole purpose of HDR is to bring to an image the entire tonal range that the human eye can resolve that cameras typically fail to capture.
This image is a two frame panorama using two of the four frames I used in the one posted yesterday. I was so pleased with the lighting here that I completed the processing of this shot (these shots) before I even realized that I had taken enough (four) for the larger panorama.
On the north side of the wall that shows up in the second picture is the mission's mill and acequia. I didn't finish all my background reading on the missions, so I'm guessing that the acequia is the control center for the mission's irrigation system. My assumption is based on the fact that there are a couple sluice gates in the area and fresh water brought in via aqueduct from the San Antonio River flows through the basement of this small building. Even 300 years ago it made sense to be able to control the system from a central location. Also note the flower from the century plant (it looks like a 15 foot tall ostrich drumstick).
