A Photo a Day by Bill Heller

Church Photos

 
Saturday, May 10, 2008

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish 360° view

Back to Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish in Montecito. This was actually the first image I took with my new panoramic tripod head. But as I mentioned in an earlier post it took me a bit of time to finish all of the shots and in the time it took the light had changed quite a bit. I did not think I was going to be able to stitch it together right. But now that I have had a little practice I was able to get it to work.

Of course that brought up some new problems. The image is so large I kept getting "Hard drive full" errors. Strange seeing as how there was 500 gig of space. In the end I realized that the format of the hard drive only allows a maximum of four gigabyte files. Yeah, it's a big picture... ten feet wide actually.

 
Thursday, January 10, 2008

Our Lady of Mount Carmel

My intent was to get some nice sunset shots of this beautiful church in Montecito. I was a little late, but it was still a nice night.

If you tilt your head to the left and use your imagination a little you can make out half of the constellation Orion rising from behind the church.

 
Monday, March 6, 2006

Twilight Mission

By request!

I had someone leave feed back who was interested in photos of the Mission Santa Barbara. (see August 12, '05)

I am developing a tool that will allow everyone to browse the previous photos of the day by keyword and various other tools to allow easy navigation. I do have the calendar, if you have not seen that, be sure to click on the link on the upper right of the screen. That will allow you to see thumbnails of the photo of the day a month at a time.

Now, on to the Mission. This is the Mission Santa Barbara “Queen of the Missions.” It was founded on December 4, 1786 by Father Fermin Lasuen. It was the tenth of 21 Franciscan missions in California. It holds the distinction of being the only one to remain in continuous use since the day it was founded. Named for Saint Barbara, and founded on the day of her annual memorial feast, it continues to operate as home of the Saint Barbara Parish. And it is a place that always makes me happy to be a photographer! Here is a list of my other images of the Mission Santa Barbara and her grounds on the photo of the day.

 
Friday, February 17, 2006

Santa Barbara Mission Twilight

This was a long exposure. The exposure time made the reflection much more interesting. it gave the effect of the sharpness near the bottom of the image getting blurry near the top where the water was falling from the top of the fountain.

 
Wednesday, September 7, 2005

Mission Sunset

Sunset at the Mission, would only be better if that tree were not in the shot. But that's ok, I like the trees around here.

 
Friday, August 12, 2005

A View from the Mission

Most of the mission shots you see don't give you an appreciation for the beautiful setting of the surrounding Mission grounds. The beautiful color in this photo is from the setting sun which was behind me to my right. Although the moisture in the atmosphere makes it hard to see where sky ends and sea begins, you can see hints of the outlines of the Channel Islands at the horizon.

 
Monday, July 11, 2005

Nighttime Mission

The cool thing about this long exposure is that fact that it made the surface of the water look like glass. If you look closely you can see that there are blurry areas near the center of the fountain where the water was running down. But most of the waves that moved slowly across the surface disappeared. I thought the motion of the ripples across the water would blur a larger part of the reflection but sometimes you get a pleasant surprise.

 
Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Mission Palms at Night

Always lookin' for a different angle on a subject. Especially one as photographed as the Mission.

 
Saturday, May 14, 2005

Church Lights

It's the little things I like about this photo. The church bell and the palm tree in silhouette and the green glow of the reader board all make the photo much more interesting.

 
Thursday, May 5, 2005

Mission Storm

I actually went out to get a shot of a really nice rainbow. But the scene of the clouds over the mission was the best opportunity of the day. The clouds were bunched around the mountain. As the sun set, it was shining under them through the heavy rain close the mountain. It made for some particularly dramatic lighting. As you can see from the streak of car headlights on the right of the photo, this was not a short exposure.

 
Sunday, May 1, 2005

Mission Gardens

There are quite a few images of the front of the Santa Barbara Mission. And for good reason, it is a beautiful place. But it's beauty is much more than skin deep.



 
Thursday, March 3, 2005

Mission Sunset

We don't get a lot of clouds around here. But when we do it's quite a show, the whole sky was lit up like this.

 
Sunday, February 27, 2005

Christmas Mission

Mission Santa Barbara “Queen of the Missions” was founded on December 4, 1786 by Father Fermin Lasuen. It was the tenth of 21 Franciscan missions in California. It holds the distinction of being the only one to remain in continuous use since the day it was founded. Named for Saint Barbara, and founded on the day of her annual memorial feast, it continues to operate as home of the Saint Barbara Parish.

 
Sunday, January 30, 2005

Grace Lutheran

Tonight I am working on my church's website. We recently had the grounds landscaped and have made some other improvements which made a good opportunity for some photos.

If all goes well you should be able to see the finial results in a few hours at www.GraceLutheran.net

 
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