Glow, photo by Harold Davis. View this photo larger.

This is a capture of a stained glass window in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe brilliantly backlit by the late afternoon sun.

The Loretto Chapel is a pretty weird place. Privately owned (sold by the order of nuns who built the chapel) there’s a charge for admission. Inside, a soundtrack with quasi-religious theme music tells you about the various “miracles” related to the chapel. Like a carpenter showing up to build the special spiral staircase just when the nuns needed him, and only charging for his materials and not his time. It is a pretty neat staircase, and maybe I’ll post a photo of it later.

Compared with the blatant, mind-numbing tourist commercialism of Santa Fe, the Loretto Chapel is actually pretty understated. Just how many shops selling Indian trinkets, not to mention art galleries of various persuasions, can you have in a square half mile? Based on Santa Fe, an incredible density is indeed possible.

The beginning of March has got to be a kind of shoulder season in Santa Fe, so it wasn’t really too crowded, and it was fun for me to be an ambling tourist with a camera exploring the area around the Plaza.