On to the Next

I've been thinking lately about what it takes to do long term projects and how to not get bored after a certain amount of time. I have the issue because my attention span is about 30 seconds. And I have been kind of getting bored taking pictures in Downtown LA and Hollywood. Maybe its because I have a limited amount of places I can shoot with my portfolio project.

Maybe I wont have any problems because my next project wont be like that. Maybe it will be more like a pilgrimmage. There is most definatly a starting  and ending point where my current project doesn't have that. Yeah, thats the key.

Here's my set from my Hollywood shots thus far

Last Trip to Hollywood for a bit

Hopefully...

I went a couple of weeks ago. The whole trip was planned to a 'T' a few days before hand. I hate going down there without a plan because I usually spend more time than I want to walking around. I'm trying to learn how to be lazy while I'm out. Its not easy when you like looking at stuff. Like the last few times I parked at the Metro Green Line Station which always works out to my advantage.

My itinerary for the day was:
The Wiltern
Pantages
Hollywood Palladium
Las Angeles Theater
Angels Flight
Tower Theater
and the Mayan

My favorite spot of this trip was most definately Angels Flight. I had heard about it several years ago when it reopened but forgot about it until I had seen an advertisement for it on the subway. It's the shortest railway in America and its priced expensively at 50 cents. I wish it were longer than 2 minutes cause I had a blast. heir

I also had a tiny excursion to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire at the Santa Fe Dam in Irwindale. Tis an adventure all must attempt before thy return to the pit of despair, aka Monday morning. I caught the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor who are funny as hell.

Now on with this weeks set of shots.

Give me shout out on what you think.

Last Set of from LA for Awhile

Its been about 2 weeks since my last post. I went for a night shoot in Hollywood, where all my pictures still came all washed out which leads me to believe that there is something wrong with my camera. I realized afterwards that I took the wrong meter measurements with my SLR to match up with my meter on my Yashica so I screwed up again. I'm going to get the whole apature issue down one of these days, whether it be depth of field or overexposing my film. The most important mistake I learned was don't meter for 250 ISO when your film is clearly marked 400 ISO. You let too much light in and then your pictures look like crap. I'll post the examples at the bottom of the post.

Other than that, I was having some weird issues where some spots are really sharp and other spots were not focused correctly, and it was happening on the same negative. This issue has been happening since my first test roll since fixing the shutter mechanism in February.

I was going to go back and re-shoot everything that I jacked up with my incorrect metering this past weekend, but the intense rain on Friday and Saturday ruined any chance at that. I wont be able to get out there for another two weekends which is a major bummer.

Here are the most decent of what I shot on my most recent trip.

I started my night off at Staples Center with a nice shot of what I presume to  be a statue of Magic Johnson

Took the Metro Red Line to Pantages

Cut on over to the Arclight Cinemas

And I ended up down at the House of Blues and walked to The Key Club about half a mile down the road.

These next two shots are from my Intermediate class. They are substandard and I didn't work very hard when I took these since I developed the roll with only half of the exposures used. They really aren't substandard, I just didn't get the reaction from my teacher that I was hoping for. I shall do better on the next project. I need to show off more.

Portfolio Shoot in Downtown LA

This weeks shoot was a bit different from the last few shoots I went on. I went to see the Ansel Adams Exhibit that was being held at an independent studio in Downtown using prints provided by the Los Angeles Public Library. I'll talk more about the photo exhibit in a different post.

I didn't really really shoot too much this week. I had one roll left in my Yashica Mat and I needed to get it finished ASAP. Right around the corner from the exhibit just happened to be the Tower Theater. I visited this theater a few weeks ago on my initial visit to the Broadway theater district. For me, the place seemed to be fairly difficult to shoot as the front of the theater is blocked by an ever so stupid looking street light placed in front of a magnificent looking building. The last time, I got a similar shot to what was printed on the main page of the theaters website. So this time, I thought I would focus more on the side of the building and shooting it from the back.

The majority of the shots seemed to be of the kind altered by the parallax between the two lenses, but I did get a pretty great shot, in my opinion, that I probably shall be using on my portfolio.

As I've noticed recently while shooting film, at least I got one.

Part two of my shoot was just a few blocks down from the Tower Theater. The Mayan Theater and the Belasco. I've been seeing the Mayan Theater pop up ever since I first learned about it, like on Storage Wars.

Well, that's about it for this week. I think I am going to go on Thursday or Friday evening to get some good pictures of The Roxy, The Palladium and the Keyclub. 

Portfolio Shoot from West Hollywood

For the past month and a half, I have been trying to build up a decent archive of images to work from instead of working roll to roll. I have gone about three times and have about one or two more shoots that I am planning before I stick with just printing my pictures, but it seems that I am kind of limited to the kind of pictures that I can take and where I can take them from. Here, I will show you some of the worse examples. These are still on the better than snapshot side, just not good enough for me to stick in my professional portfolio.

These ones are more or less are not as good because I dont have enough want and balls to get a better angle. Maybe they might even be better if I had stuck my camera on my monopod and set the self timer. I can probably get a more interesting angle that way.

These three are just subject to location and patience. The first one I was able to squeeze my lens in a spot  not blocked by a chain link fence. the second one is the real test of patience. I was waiting for a good 5 minutes just to be able to see the kodak sign, but was unable to get the theater half into the shot. Also the security guard wouldnt let me rest my monopod on the floor even though it had a rubber stop on the bottom. The third image was location. For some reason these old theaters have huge giant trees in front of them. NOt very easy to get a shot without a tree in it. The Mayan Theater has that same problem even though it has a ton of decorations on the outside.

These last two are pictures I think I am going to use for my project. The shot of the Disney Hall especially will be in there. There is almost no way you can shoot that place badly even if you try. The black spot on the left hand side was from a light leak on my Lubitel from the red window on the back. I'm going to crop it out by printing the rest of it bigger using an easel. 

Well, if anybody has any tips for taking better ground level shots, leave a comment. Thanks.

Yashica Mat EM Test Roll 1

I picked up a Yashica Mat EM on Ebay a week ago and when it came in the mail I decided to run a test roll through it before I went on my big shooting extravaganza in Hollywood this past weekend.  Unfortunately for me, from the results I got I wont be able to tell if I will be able to use it all for my big portfolio project.

When I got the camera in the mail, I was checking out some important issues such as all of the knobs and buttons along with timing a couple of the shutter speeds. It turns out the shutter was sticking on every setting while the aperture and the focus knob were moving just fine. I looked up the issue on Google and found out it wasn't too difficult to fix the issue. 

After putting it back together I ran a test roll and here are the results.

This was the only one that came out some type of sharp, but when it was scanned that big light spot showed up that I didn't see in the negative.

This was just a throw away picture but came our really cool.

I think I'm just going to have to bracket with the focusing to see what the accurate distance on the focus knob. I'll be developing roll number 2 from the Yashica Mat on Tuesday, which should give me a better idea on how its working.

Results from Lubitel Shoot

Last time, I was describing my new old camera, the Lubitel 2. I got a little too technical even for me. I went shot at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which seems to be my most favorite place to shoot, and I have some results along with some pros and cons of using a completely manual camera. I have yet to edit some of these pictures because at least one of them will be used for my project and I am printing it out in the darkroom and not on the computer.

In this first image, it gives me a great idea of what to expect from this camera.  There are a couple of issues, but the most major one is a quirk of having a camera with a hole in the back for viewing the image number, and that is the vignetting. You can really see the big spot on the bottom left corner and slight darkening on the other three corners. Another hard issue is the viewing screen. When I was trying to frame  the image, I had to guess with over half the image because all I could see was the outline of the lens. It didn't fit the screen. I just happen to be good at aiming. An acquired skill from playing a lot of Duck Hunt on my NES 20years ago. Other than that, the image looks sharp enough to me.

This self portrait of myself was an interesting shot to see after developing my film. It shows the very point of why film is such a great medium. I can't see this being done on a digital camera unless you combine two different images. In order to take an image on the Lubitel, you have to manually cock the shutter and then hit the shutter release and then wind the film to the next position. What I did was take the first shot by accident which was my image in the upper left corner, and then I forgot to wind the image to the next shot and I hit the shutter open again. 

My last two images are just so so for me.

I scanned this one because the cars looked a little like toys, and it is a great shot of the front of the concert hall.

This one was another double exposure taken from the garden/courtyard on the backside of the concert hall. I guess i wanted to take another self portrait since I had screwed the last one up and I forgot to wind it to the next shot again. In this image, I was trying to capture a bee, but I don't think I got it.

All in all, I think i got my moneys worth for this camera, and I will most definately have to trade off week to week between this camera and my new old Yashica Mat EM, that should be arriving tomorrow.

New Camera

Well... not a New new camera, but rather and old camera that is new to me. I've been frequenting a local photography store and checking out their used cameras. Most of the time their prices are a little steep, and its very understandable since they have to keep their bottom line. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a very interesting camera called a Lubitel 2.

Now, I have been studying twin lens cameras for the past 2 months or so, because i am naturally progressing from 35mm to a 120 film size. Its kind of the easiest way to progress with picture composition and overall quality without shelling out a crapload of change on cameras like a Mamiya 7 or a Hasselblad. The Lubitel 2 is an incredibly inexpensive camera that gives an entry level experience into twin lenses and was almost as fun shooting as the Yashica Mat i check out from school.

So, this camera is fully manual. No shortcuts here, my friend. In order to take a shot, the shutter has to be cocked. The shutter speeds go from 1/15th of a second to 1/250th of a second with an extra bulb setting. Not really too much to work with but that is where exposure compensation comes into play. The aperature settings go from a slow f4.5 through f22. There is very little in the way of getting any fast moving shots, but if you are a patient person, that should be no problem and just use this for still life, snapshot, or anything creative. 

There is a waist level viewer with a flip up loupe for focusing, but I don't like the missing grid lines on most other waist level viewers. Its a bit harder to compose your picture.

The biggest confusion I had prior to shooting was the lack of an ISO meter. This is because there is no light meter and you should be using an external meter for setting the exposure. I think I goofed a bit since my light meter was my Canon Rebel and it was set for ISO 400 and the film I used was 100. One stop up shouldnt hurt the images thought.

I used Fuji Neopan 100 film and should be processing the film today and shall post my results and see if I will go out and shoot with it again.