Exhibiting at the Month of Photography LA

In conjunction with the Month of Photography LA, I'll be exhibiting at the Fathom Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Many of the other photographers on hand are counted as legends and giants of the wonderful world of photography. I am proud and truly humbled to be exhibiting in their company.

My Favorite Shots for 2014

I am firmly convinced that Los Angeles has always been one of the most interesting cities in the world, and it's even more so now with all the activity in the newly revitalized Downtown, also known as the Historic Core. Basically abandoned from about 1980 to just a couple of years ago, the population has boomed from an estimated 10,000 five years ago to over 45,000 today. There are new businesses, new construction, once-abandoned skyscrapers converted into live/work spaces, the Bringing Back Broadway initiative.and many new faces.

In no particular order, here are a few of my favorite images from this last year.

                                    

Angels Flight

The historic and ancient Angels Flight funicular on Bunker Hill closed down a year ago due to some "technical" issues, which have since been repaired, and it is promised that it will reopen soon. I sure hope so. it had been in mothballs for decades, but a group of concerned citizens formed a committee, and the little train (one of the shortest funicular lines in the world) was back in business, until it broke.

But when it reopened a couple of years ago, I jumped on board. I gave the guy in the little ticket building at the top a handful of quarters and spent about two hours just riding up and down. Both the ticket guy and I lost count of my rides. I took a ton of pictures of people riding the cars, but most of them were crap (so it goes).

Still, I had a good time in the Disneyland of my mind. Thanks, funicular people.

Hollywood at my front door

For the last couple of weeks, Downtown LA streets have been blocked every which-a-way. You had a Japanese religious festival, a commercial video for a downscale Honda Accord zooming down 4th, the filming of a Gray's Anatomy special, and the biggie, an upcoming TV series production. I suppose I should be blasé about all this stuff, but, hey, DTLA is practically Hollywood's back lot and who can hate that?

Seen here is the view from the 2nd floor mezzanine of my apartment building in the heart of Downtown, a live-action shot from the upcoming "Ironsides" TV series, with Blair Underwood in the wheelchair. (Notice the production stills photographer at the front of the NYPD cop car? Sweet job.)

This scene is staged and lit as a night scene, even though it was only about 6 PM with sunset an hour and a half away, and the RAW's histogram is actually pretty flat. In pre-visualizing the final image, I wanted to duplicate the look of a prime-time TV production, which these days features low-key lighting, lots of gamma tweaking & deep shadows for "atmosphere" and shifting the color temperatures high into the blue. Edited in Lightroom 4.3 with my own home-brew 'Cinema Blue' preset, and finished in Photoshop CS6.

Mural "Lady of DTLA" finally finished

Los Angeles artist Robert Vargas has been working on a mural for the Gallery Row district of downtown L.A. for the last two weeks, and yours truly has been documenting the whole thing.

We'll be publishing a book detailing the whole soup-to-nuts shortly. In the meantime, there are a bunch of images of the process on my Facebook page.

Also, too, a big shout-out to Isabel Rojas-Williams of the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles for her invaluable assistance.

Keep your eyes on this space.

In Memorium

About two weeks ago, there was a collision between a tow truck and a Metro bus on the corner of 5th and Broadway, which also took out the front of a 7-11 store a block from my apartment. Tragically, the bus driver was killed. 

The boarded-up front of the convenience store became an impromptu memorial site, with many of the Metro bus' regular riders paying their respects to their favorite driver with signage, flowers and candles. As of this morning, the street department removed all of it, but I managed to take a few images before the clean-up.

Sombrero with Two Giraffes

Promote peace by imagining a kinship between seemingly unrelated places. - "Yoko Ono"

When I first spotted these giraffes behind the barricade shielding an empty lot on 5th Street in downtown LA, I assumed that the owner, recognizing that the bland and downright shabby wall was adding nothing to the neighborhood, had commissioned these delightful twins. No such thing, as it turns out.

So the other day when I ran into Wild Life, a friend of mine and a noted local artist, and he asked me, "What's shakin'", I mentioned the giraffes. "Oh, I did those." Duh. So, it turns out that pair of even-toed ungulates is the work of my friend, guerrilla street artist Wild Life and his partner, Calder Greenwood. The duo (the artists, not the giraffes) have a long history of depositing art all over downtown, in a series cheerfully dubbed "Art Appears", and have been written up in the Los Angeles Times and even Huffington Post.

Previous works have included a papier-mâché family of sun bathers in the empty lot across from City Hall and re-imagined baby dolls on lamp-posts, but most notoriously, an ultra-realistic and instructive bogus sign attached to the Walt Disney Music Center. Their main focus is art-bombing downtown with counterfeit signage attached to such mundane objects as potted palms and dumpsters, and labeling them as commissioned works of art. Additionally, their plaques are signed with rather good forgeries of the signatures of some famous names, including those of Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Werner Herzog and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Lessons learned

 

When I first starting shooting color, the film choices were pretty limited: Kodachrome for daylight and high speed Ektachrome (pushed) for night shots and other lowlight situations. The results were, basically, take it or leave it. With the advent of digital capture, there is an amazing amount of latitude in processing color images and everything I knew went out the window. The learning curve has been steep, not helped by the rapid evolution of computer processors and graphics cards, choices of processing software, and a zillion other tangible and intangible things.

 After I recently installed a new video card I observed that the perceptive gamma and black point of a lot of my old edits had changed dramatically, so I've been revisiting some of my favorite older files and reediting them. The process has given me an opportunity to rethink their emotional content and apply a fresh look in line with my more *advanced* expertise and computer technology.

 My workflow now includes primary color correction and color values assigned in Lightroom, then edited as a PSD in Photoshop to enable local area selection of curves, luminance and saturation.

Here's a image, shot about a year ago, reedited to reflect the fact that it was damn cold (about 35 degrees F) when I shot it.

DTLA Instagram skylines

Rosslyn Hotel and annex

Rowan Lofts, 5th & Spring

Security Building, 5th & Spring

SB Lofts, 6th & Spring

Spring Street parking garage facade

Rosslyn Hotel annex, 5th & Main

View of the Santa Fe Building on Main at 6th

Elevator shed, rooftop on Wall Street

Arcade Building on Broadway

SB Lofts, 6th & Spring

SB Tower, 6th & Spring

Darth Vader Food Truck

The monthly Downtown Art Walk features art, obviously, and it's popularity has grown from a handful of visitors at the first Art Walk in 2004 to an estimated 15,000 more recently, and the food trucks have moved in.

The trucks are pretty scarce in the downtown core most of the time, but they arrive in the dozens during Art Walk. There was an explosion in the numbers of them about a year ago and the City Council and the Art Walk Board put together a plan to shunt them off the main streets and onto parking lots, which quite frankly makes them now hard to find.

I spotted this unit hiding in a corner of a lot in an undisclosed location. I had never seen it before and I was taken with it's stealth appearance, appropriate given the strict regulations on where to set up one of these beasts nowadays.

As for the food itself, I couldn't tell you, since I prefer to sit down when I eat.

Nikon D70s w/Nikkor DX 55-200mm f4-5.6 ED VR

Portraits of LA project

A sample of my progress on my Portraits of LA project.

Broadway people

In their infinite mystery, thousands of people walk the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Where do they come from? Where are they going? Who are they, really? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do know that to them, I too am just another stranger passing by.