Mission San Juan Capistrano

Alta California was originally a territory under Spanish empire rule, and later became a territory in independent Mexico. It consisted of some of today’s US states (California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Western Colorado, and Southwestern Wyoming). The territory passed to American control after the Mexican-American war, and ceased to exist with the creation of the State of California in 1850. A notable characteristics of Alta California territory is the many missions that were built in it over the years. One of the more famous missions is Mission San Juan Capistrano which resides in today’s Orange County, CA, in the city of San Juan Capistrano. It was founded once in Oct. 1775, and then again in Nov. 1776, and currently houses the oldest building in California still in use, Serra’s Chapel built in 1782. Today, the mission compound serves as a museum, with the Serra Chapel still serving as a chapel for Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano. Mission San Juan Capistrano is also famous for “The Great Stone Church” (shown in one of the pictures below), which was almost leveled by an 1812 earthquake, and is dubbed by Architects as the American Acropolis. Moreover, it is known for the annual “Return of the Swallows” which is traditionally observed every March 19 (Saint Joseph’s Day).

Due to its rich history and its building styles, Mission San Juan Capistrano has been pretty popular with architects, artists, and photographers over the years. Almost any time you stop by, chances are you will meet artist painters, or newly weds having their engagement or wedding pictures taken on the premises.

Every time we visit the city of San Juan Capistrano, we usually end up visiting the mission as well, and taking a few pictures. This time we were there in the early afternoon when the light was still pretty harsh and thus not much liked by any photographer. But we took our chances and decided to take a few pictures, some of which are shown below. Like any architecture and building photography, having a wide-angle lens is pretty helpful as you are typically limited in how far back you can position yourself from the building while trying to capture the building in its entirety and avoiding distractions in your shots such as other visitors, etc. So, for this shoot, we decided to use our Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, which gives us an awesome 114 degrees max Angle of View on our full-frame sensor. (If you like the math, you can read here more about the relationship between focal length and angle of view of a lens. And if you prefer to avoid the math, this would be a good summary description). Another important factor in architecture photography is typically to have a large Depth of Field (DoF), since you would want the whole building in focus. And this is another benefit you would get by using wide-angle lenses even at larger apertures. For example, at 14mm focal length, even at f/2.8 aperture, if you stay 10m away from your subject (i.e., your focusing point), your DoF will start at about 8.1m in front of your subject, and will extend to infinity. Here is a good tutorial on DoF and how it is calculated. And if you search in any App store, you will find a few apps both for iOS and Android which help you calculate DoF given all the required parameters (aperture, focal length, distance from subject, and sensor size). Of course, when using wide-angle lenses, one has to be mindful of the perspective distortion that will occur, which would be more pronounced the closer you get to the subject. You can read more about optical and perspective distortions here. This is the main reason why wide-angle lenses are never considered as good portrait lenses, unless, of course, you are after some creative expression (for example, see here).

Here are some of our recent pictures from Mission San Juan Capistrano. While most are taken with our Nikon D800E using our 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, a couple of the pictures are taken with our small but trusty Canon Powershot S95 Point and Shoot camera. Hope you like the pictures, and hope you also get a chance to visit Mission San Juan Capistrano, if you have not been there already. As always, please feel free to leave comments and critique. Thanks for visiting…