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.

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.