January 17, 2011

• PhotoPost: Mission San Juan Capistrano

  

  The following photos have been selected from my new Webshots Folder: Mission San Juan Capistrano, which contains 215 photos I took yesterday morning (01-15-11).  None of the following photos are doctored in any way. This is the first photo expedition I've taken since I photographed the pink sunset at Torrance Beach back in October. I got in my car at about 7am, and started driving down the San Diego freeway. Even though gas is $3.30 a gallon, this is the first nice weekend we've had this year, following the suckiest New Year's I've had the displeasure of living through. I had a NEED to go take photos, and gathered up what I thought were two fully charged batteries, and my 7.2 pixel Sony Cybershot camera, which hasn't seen any "duty" in a long time.

  

  I found out later that I didn't fully charge one of the batteries. I wanted to get some photos of San Clemente, a beach town where Pat and I used to go frequently, perhaps take some photos along the 17 mile stretch of beachhead which fronts the Marine base at Camp Pendleton, between San Clemente and Oceanside, in the San Diego county, and maybe even get down to Oceanside. On the way, I got off on San Juan Capistrano Blvd, since I'd never taken any photos of any of the missions (except San Gabriel, near to where I grew up), and Capistrano is where the swallows return every March, it is possibly the most "famous" of the 21 missions, and it was on the way. I was surprised to find that the mission is pretty much a ruin. The main cathedral only has the back wall standing.

  

  There was a fee to get into the mission. $9.00 didn't seem too steep a price. Here, right after I walked through the visitor's building, I see one of the ubiquitous El Camino Real bells (which line the coast of California, pinpointing Father Serra's exact route of the Royal Road which connected the missions.) and the ruin of the main building, which was the largest of the Mission churches,and was destroyed by an earthquake in 1812. You can see a koi pond and the statue of Father Serra in front of the ruin in this photo.

  

  I took many photos of the koi pond, attempting to get both photos of the fish, the reflection, and the background. I thought this was one of the better photos, although you can't see any of the fish. More photos are in my Webshots Gallery folder.

  

  Another shot of the ruin and the koi pond. Only a few scattered clouds behind me in this shot, but the sky was a beautiful blue even at about 8:30 in the morning.

  

  In this photo, you see the small model of the main cathedral placed at the front of what used to be the real thing. It's amazing I've always heard about this particular mission, but never knew it was destroyed so long ago. (1812). Mission San Juan Capistrano was built in 1776, to break up the long journey between the San Diego mission, which was the first (1769), and San Gabriel, which was built in 1771.

  
  Some of the mission bells are shown on the right. More are in the arched alcoves to the left of the ruin.
  

  I'm on the trail winding around the mission walls. It was very serene, even though even at around nine in the morning, there were plenty of tourists on the grounds. The sky is almost blinding in it's beauty.

  

  The mission cemetery is located on the north section of the property. A number of priests and bishops are buried there. I didn't take note of who was buried in this particular grave, but it was a bishop who died in the 30s if memory serves.

  

  I'm inside the actual chapel which is still in use. This was a Saturday, so no services were being given. I did remember to doff my hat before I entered the chapel, and I didn't use my flash when taking photos. This chapel is quite beautiful inside. Most of the exterior of the mission is constructed of adobe brick, of course.

  

  I'm having a bit of trouble with my computer this morning. I did try to tweak this shot (which was taken with the ISO position on my camera, for non flash photos in low lights) to increase the contrast in Picasa, but the program crashed twice. My CPU is running at 100 per cent this a.m. so I am featuring the photo as shot. This is taken from the back,or entrance to the chapel, and I didn't even see the priest walking down the aisle till I took the shot.

  

  I got many photos around the koi pond in the middle of the courtyard, but this simple panorama is the shot I want to showcase on my blog. It isn't necessarily the best photo, but it shows the courtyard the best of all my shots.

  

  Again, I have some closeups of this area to the left of the courtyard too, showing the mule statue closer, and getting the dome framed with foliage, but I wanted to give my readers a panorama of the courtyard, and the wide angle shot shows more of the area than the up close photographs.

  

  Here is a more "arty" shot aiming south, where I catch some of the Capistrano landscape through the archway. While walking around the mission, I was struck by how the early Spanish settlers might experience Southern California, since this area is not near any urban centers, and is still quite rural. The Los Rios section of town is the oldest residential neighborhood in California, but sadly, the battery ran out on my camera right after I exited the mission.

  
  This is one of the original adobe walls, encased in glass to preserve it.
  

  On the west side of the mission property are displays showing the historical and cultural significance of the mission to daily life in Southern California during the Mission Era. I got some shots of some of the artifacts, in "reverse magic time" with the sun coming up over my shoulder, since it's pretty early in the morning.

  

    I like the shadows in this shot, from one of the covered corridors lining the courtyard.
  

  In this shot from the courtyard's koi pond, I get a shot of one of the fish, and some reflection. More reflections, and more fish, are in the Webshots folder linked above. I love koi, which resemble large goldfish, because my mother built a landscaped koi pond at our last family house in Glendora right before she had the stroke. We had about a dozen fish. There were over two dozen in this pond in the middle of the courtyard.

  
  Here is another shot of the koi pond/fountain in the center of the mission courtyard.
  
  Some roses in bloom.
  
  One last view of the mission before leaving, framed by a tree.

  Required Reading: Wikipedia entry on Spanish Missions in California.
  Official City Website.
  History of the mission from About.com

  For some reason my computer is being incredibly slow this weekend. Perhaps all the programs being developed for faster systems are serving to crash my old "XP" windows operating system. It's now after 11am, and I began uploading photos to Xanga at a little past 9am. I've already done two loads of wash while being frustrated about how slow it's been taking to create this entry. Xanga isn't fast at all these days either, and some or other 'script' was causing Webshots to run slower on both the IE8 and Firefox 3.6 browser. (Firefox 4 won't even LOAD these days.) I'm not known for my patience, and what little I have has been taxed like heck this morning. Oh well, hopefully I'll get lots of readers interested in this photopost. So many folks tell me they miss my SoCal Photo Expeditions, and this is the first time I've ever been in San Juan Capistrano, which has always just been a freeway exit on the way to San Diego. I love living in SoCal, because no matter where I've been, there are always so many places where I haven't been, and when I discover a new place for me, I like to take my blogreaders with me. MFN/ppf

  EDIT: 01/17/10: 6:22a.m. pdt. I had to delete three spam comments from this entry last night. Seems to be a lot more spammers on Xanga since I got back from my last hiatus. That said, it's a lot easier to get to Top Blogs these days too! MFN/ppf

   

  Posted: January 16, 2011 11:08 AM

  • 9:24 am
  • 44 Comments