Seasons greetings

Window shopping for a Santa Claus, Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles

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.