San Antonio Missions, Part II

First things first: the Longhorn baby boomers BOOMED the Sooners. Congratulations to the Texas Longhorns, beating #10 Oklahoma 24 – 17. It's certainly taken a while, but this was a sweet win.

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).

That's all there is for this session. It's cooled off a little this week and I'm anxious to go back and do the HDR shoot, so perhaps it won't be so long between posts next time.