Mission Concepción – San Antonio, Texas

Stairwell

I thought I would share a few photos from a visit to Mission Concepción in San Antonio, Texas a little over one year ago. The San Antonio Missions National Historical Park consists of  5 Spanish missions built along the San Antonio River in the 1700s to bring Christianity to the native population and to make them Spanish citizens.

On my visit to Mission Concepción several parts of the old church were going through a stabilization process and for reasons of safety were off limits. Even with the partial closures,  there are limitless photo possibilities. The Spanish architecture is beautiful and the light plays off of the stone walls very nicely, providing photographers with lots of opportunities to test your ability to handle difficult lighting situations. In some ways, the light reflecting from one wall to another reminded me of the photographic challenges of shooting in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau.

Bell tower and sky at Mission Concepcion

I’m often asked about my process when developing an image and I’m happy to share my techniques. The image of the stairwell was captured using a Daylight White Balance setting and has had minimal processing applied. In other words, this is how it looked.

For the image of the bell tower and sky, I took some artistic liberties  selectively de-saturating the image while cooling the shadows and warming the highlights to achieve the look seen here.

Walkway and arches

In the last image, I have applied the effect of a cooling filter and added some contrast to emphasize the shapes of the walkway and arches. Again I have cooled the shadows and warmed the highlights.

All the images shown here were captured with the Canon EOS 5D and EF24-70/2.8L lens with the camera mounted on a tripod to insure sharp pictures. All images were captured as raw files and processing was accomplished using Photoshop CS3.

Please click on any image for an expanded view.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Churches & Missions, Cultural, National Park, Texas, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.