May 13, 2021 by Zenithshots

The Ponce de Leon Hotel, St. Augustine: A Walk Through the Building

Poured concrete in 1888, and the glass to match.

Two facts about this building govern everything a photographer does in it, and both are unusual for 1888.

The first is the construction. It was built of poured concrete — one of the earliest large-scale uses of the material in the United States — with local coquina as the aggregate. Coquina is a limestone made of compressed shell fragments, quarried nearby, and it gives the concrete a pale, slightly warm, faintly speckled surface unlike either stone or stucco.

That matters because poured concrete allowed forms that masonry would not: thick walls with deep-set openings, arcades, towers and a courtyard plan, all cast rather than laid. The building is Spanish Renaissance Revival in style and structurally modern in a way its appearance conceals.

The second is the glass. The building holds one of the largest collections of Tiffany stained glass in a single place, installed as part of the original scheme rather than added later — which means coloured light is a designed feature of the interiors rather than an incidental one.

Those two facts together produce a specific photographic situation. Thick cast walls with deep reveals give collimated directional light wherever there is a plain window. Tiffany glass gives strongly coloured light wherever there is a decorated one. And the two conditions occur within a few metres of each other.

The third governing fact is the plan. The building is arranged around a courtyard, which is the arrangement Spanish Renaissance architecture uses and it is the best thing about the building photographically: an open-topped room, enclosed on four sides, carrying daylight all day and changing character completely with the sun’s angle.

St. Augustine sits at about twenty-nine and three-quarter degrees north at close to sea level, which is far enough south to make two numbers important: a June noon sun of around eighty-three and a half degrees, and a civil twilight of roughly twenty-two minutes — among the shortest in this library.

Days run from about ten hours fifteen to fourteen hours, which is a narrow range compared with the northern venues, so the schedule is less seasonal here than almost anywhere else.

What follows is a walk through in the order a wedding uses the building. We have not photographed one here; what the current use permits, which spaces are bookable and the hours are questions for whoever manages it — and the first matters, because a historic hotel of this kind is now frequently an institution rather than a hotel.

The Ponce de Leon Hotel at a glance

Where	An 1888 Spanish Renaissance Revival building in St. Augustine, Florida
The construction	Poured concrete with coquina aggregate — early, and structurally modern
The glass	One of the largest Tiffany collections in a single place, original to the scheme
The plan	Arranged around a courtyard — an open-topped room that carries daylight all day
Ask first	What the current use permits and which spaces are bookable

The courtyard and the arcades

Start in the courtyard, because it is the building’s organising space and its best light.

A walled courtyard is an open-topped interior and it behaves like one: lit by the sky and by its own walls, changing completely as the sun crosses. At noon it is a bright box with overhead light and very little shape. Early and late it is a single enormous directional bounce, with one wall lit and the opposite in shade.

In pale coquina concrete that bounce is efficient and faintly warm — the material returns a good proportion of the light with a slight cream cast, which flatters skin. A subject standing three or four metres out from a sunlit courtyard wall is lit by a source the size of the wall, with a wrap no portable modifier reproduces at that scale.

Distance from the wall is the control and further is usually better. A metre away the wall subtends a narrow angle and the light is harsh; four metres out it subtends a wide angle and wraps.

The arcades around the courtyard are the second resource and they are the most useful spaces in the building. An arcade is optically a very large soft source with a hard mask: light enters from the open side, bounces off the paving and the vaulted ceiling, wraps around a subject, and falls off with depth. The columns break it into bays.

Depth back from the open edge is the entire control. At the edge the light is bright and nearly frontal with a low ratio. A metre back it acquires direction and opens to around three to one. Two or three metres back against the wall the ratio is dramatic and the sunlit courtyard beyond has fallen four stops.

Florida’s humidity moderates that slightly, which is worth knowing: water vapour scatters light and fills shadows, so the lit-to-shaded gap here is perhaps a stop narrower than the same arcade would give in Arizona. That makes the deep positions more forgiving and the whole building easier than a dry-climate equivalent.

The columns reward precision. A camera moved a few inches decides whether a column bisects a face, frames it, or disappears — and a couple centred in a single arch with the arcade receding behind them turns repetition into composition.

The paving does the uplight. Tile or stone under a sunlit courtyard throws a warm bounce up into the arcade, which fills under the chin and opens the eye sockets, and it costs nothing.

The towers are the building’s exterior signature and they want a long lens from distance rather than a wide one from close. Compression brings them forward and stacks them against the sky; a wide lens from the courtyard renders them small at the top of a frame full of foreground.

And the exterior wants raking light. Cast concrete with coquina aggregate has a subtle texture — the shell fragments catch at a shallow angle and disappear under frontal light — and the deep-set openings, cornices and mouldings read only when the light comes across them. So the exterior is a first-hour or last-hour subject and a poor midday one.

Keep the camera square. A symmetrical Renaissance Revival facade photographed with the camera tilted up converges the verticals so the building leans back, which is immediately wrong. Raise the camera rather than tilting it, or correct afterwards and accept the crop.

Depth is the whole control.

Inside: the reveals and the Tiffany glass

The interiors divide into two lighting conditions and they need completely different handling.

Where there is plain glazing, the thick cast walls do the work. A window at the bottom of a deep reveal is collimated by the thickness: the light arrives as a defined beam with a hard edge rather than spreading across the room, which is precisely what a snoot does on a studio head.

That is the best portrait light in the building and it needs almost nothing. Place the subject in the reveal itself, or immediately beside the opening where the beam is widest, and there is a strong directional key, a rapid fall-off and a dark surround.

The reveals are warm, because pale coquina concrete returns the incoming light with a faint cream tint — so the light in a reveal is warmer than the daylight outside it, which flatters skin and separates a subject from any cooler shade beyond.

Respect the fall-off, because it is steep. A collimated source through a deep aperture has an extreme inverse-square gradient: one step back drops a stop, two steps drops two, and four steps back the subject is effectively unlit. Positions are precise rather than approximate.

Where there is Tiffany glass, everything changes and the colour is the subject rather than the light.

Light through stained glass takes that colour completely. A subject standing in a patch of red, gold or blue light is lit that colour, and no white balance recovers it without wrecking everything else in frame. That is not a fault to correct; it is the condition the building was designed to produce.

So there are two coherent approaches. Commit to it — place someone deliberately in a coloured patch and let the cast be the point, which in a building with glass of this quality is a genuinely strong picture. Or keep faces entirely clear of the patches and photograph the glass separately as its own subject.

What fails is the accidental middle: a face half in a green patch and half in neutral light, which reads as a mistake rather than a choice.

The patches move predictably, and working out where they will be at the hour of the ceremony is worth fifteen minutes. A window’s throw depends on its orientation and the sun’s height, and at this latitude the sun is high — which means in summer the patches land low on the opposite wall and on the floor, while in winter they travel further up the wall.

The glass itself is best photographed with the interior dark and the exterior bright, which is the normal daytime condition: the window reads as saturated colour against a dark surround. From outside at night with the interior lit, it reads as glowing colour against a dark facade — which is the better frame and needs the building lit.

The large public rooms are the third interior condition. A grand hotel dining room or rotunda of this date has high ceilings, decorative plaster or timber, and often a domed or coved ceiling with its own glazing.

Where a rotunda is top-lit, the light is a large overhead source: even coverage on a face with shadowed eye sockets, fixed by turning the subject toward the brightest patch of floor or adding a modest front fill. Where the ceiling is dark timber, bounce is unavailable and the answer is direct through a modifier with the room left dark.

Gel warm throughout and drag the shutter to a thirtieth or sixtieth so the fixtures register, because a frame exposed only for flash renders a period interior dark and anonymous.

Four metres out from a sunlit courtyard wall, not one
Depth back from the arcade edge is the whole control — humidity softens it a stop
Deep reveals are snoots: one step back is one stop
Commit to a Tiffany patch or keep faces entirely out of it. Never half
Shoot the glass from outside at night with the interior lit — the better frame

One step back is one stop.

St. Augustine, and the Florida year

The town is the building’s setting and it is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States, founded in 1565 — which gives a genuinely unusual urban fabric.

The material to know is coquina, the same shell limestone used as aggregate in the building’s concrete. Quarried locally, it is pale, porous and soft, and it was used for the town’s Spanish colonial structures because it was what there was. A coquina wall at close range is a visible mass of compressed shell fragments, which is a texture found almost nowhere else.

It needs raking light to show. Under a frontal midday sun coquina reads as a flat pale surface; at a low angle the shell structure catches and the whole wall acquires texture.

The Flagler-era buildings are the other half of the fabric. Henry Flagler developed St. Augustine as a winter resort in the 1880s, and the cluster of Spanish Renaissance Revival buildings he commissioned — this one among them — were among the first major works of their architects and among the earliest large poured-concrete structures in America.

That produces a downtown with two distinct historic layers a few streets apart: Spanish colonial coquina and 1880s revival concrete. Both photograph well and both want low light.

The trees are the third element and they are the Gulf South’s signature. Live oak is the dominant shade tree — evergreen, broad, dense and low-crowned, holding its leaves year-round — which means it casts genuine solid shade with no dapple in January as in July.

That is unusual in this library, where most canopies vanish for half the year, and it makes a live oak the reliable midday position at any time. The trade is that the canopy is dark: several stops below the open ground outside, so a subject under one with sunlit ground beyond is a four-stop frame needing a fill or a deliberate silhouette.

Spanish moss hangs from the limbs in grey-green translucent streamers and glows when backlit against a low sun — one of the most distinctive details the region offers.

Sabal palm is the state tree and it appears throughout. Like any palm it gives almost no useful shade, because the crown is high and the fronds sparse, so its shadow is a small pattern well away from the trunk. As a background it is a strong graphic vertical and it photographs best against open sky.

The Florida year runs opposite to most of this library and the reversal is emphatic.

December through April is the season. Mild, dry, sunny and comfortable, with a December noon sun of about thirty-seven degrees that models rather than flattens — and because the live oaks are evergreen, a January frame looks much like an October one. This is when Flagler brought people here and the reason is unchanged.

June through September is the constraint. Subtropical summer brings afternoon temperatures in the nineties with dewpoints in the mid-to-high seventies, which is genuinely oppressive — and for a party in formal clothing outdoors that is a welfare matter rather than a comfort one.

The humidity has a real photographic effect and it is mostly favourable. Water vapour scatters light and fills shadows, so a sunlit courtyard in July carries perhaps two and a half stops less contrast than the same sun angle in Arizona. Shadow edges are soft, eye sockets retain detail, and midday outdoors is genuinely workable. The costs are a pale washed sky and hazed long lenses.

The cloud is reliable and it is the compensation. Florida summer afternoons generate convection from sea-breeze convergence almost daily, and the half hour after a cell passes is the best light of the year: washed air, wet coquina and concrete deeply saturated, a low sun under a broken ceiling.

Two hazards go with it. Central and northern Florida receive more lightning than anywhere else in the United States, which for an outdoor ceremony in summer is a reason the covered alternative must genuinely exist. And hurricane season runs June through November, which for a coastal town is a real planning consideration rather than a theoretical one.

And the twilight is very short: about twenty-two minutes of civil twilight, among the shortest in this library. The end of the day needs its two or three frames known in advance and walked to — and the frame worth scheduling is the building lit from outside with the Tiffany glass glowing, which is the only condition in which that glass reads from the street.

Never half in and half out.

More frames from The Ponce de Leon Hotel

Solid shade, every month.

The only time the glass reads outside.

The Ponce de Leon Hotel wedding photography: common questions

What is unusual about the construction?

Poured concrete in 1888, with local coquina shell limestone as the aggregate — one of the earliest large-scale uses of the material in America.

How do I use the deep reveals?

As snoots. Thick cast walls collimate the light into a defined directional beam with a steep falloff — one step back is one stop.

How do I handle the Tiffany glass?

Commit or avoid. Place someone deliberately in a coloured patch and let the cast be the point, or keep faces entirely clear and shoot the glass separately.

What is the best glass frame?

From outside at night with the interior lit, so the windows read as glowing colour against a dark facade. It is the only condition in which they read from the street.

Does Florida humidity help?

Mostly. It fills shadows — about two and a half stops less contrast than Arizona at the same sun angle — which makes midday workable. It pales the sky and hazes distance.

When is the season?

December through April, which reverses most of this library. Mild and dry, with evergreen live oaks so January looks much like October.

More Florida venue guides

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