One idle saturday morning saw me driving towards the Annunciation Church in Houston downtown (S-W corner of Texas ave. and Crawford st.,
map here) I was greeted by sister Martha and briefly introduced about the church before given a good half hour of the prayer hall to myself to shoot. One can visit the church between mass times to find absolute peace and darkness for shooting the stained glass paintings that are the main attraction for shutterbugs. The church is about 138 years old, it is one of the few European style churches at Houston. I think it is Victorian style architecture, but cant guarantee it. Half a block of downtown was bought in 1866 for $2000 to build this church, the interiors were restored sometime earlier this century.
If you plan to go to the church for taking pictures, an appointment is recommended. For suitability of lighting, avoid 1-2 hours on either side of noon to get the sun behind the huge 10-12 ft tall windows. A weekday would be the best if you wish to avoid people, but if you work weekdays like me, saturday is better than sunday.
Pictures are taken using a Nikon FE2 with a Quantaray 70-300 mm tele-macro on Fuji Sensia 200 slide film. The candlelit picture of the Holy Mother was taken with a Nikkor 50 mm lens at 4.0 stop. Here are some pictures of the paintings, sorry about the shake on some of them..
This picture is the one I liked the best of the lot, there is mild shake but the colours look great on print.
