Building of the Phil

Walt Disney Concert Hall - Downtown LA, Fall 2011 - Shot with Canon Rebel XT, Canon 50mm f1.8,  Ilford hp5+ 400 ISO, Also might have been pushed one stop to 800 ISO

This was an old scan from a school computer before I knew about blowing off dust and using an anti static cloth. The Disney Hall has to be one of my most favorite places to take pictures of. I think I've gone there at least 6 or 7 times to shoot pictures. A marvelously designed building and a joy to look at from up close and from a distance.

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.

Ansel Adams Exhibit at DRKRM Gallery

Last week, I was fortunate to go to Downtown Los Angeles to see the series of photos Ansel Adams made for Fortune Magazine in 1940. This was my first gallery viewing as an artist. I cannot really count my trips to MOMA or the Metropolitan Museum, when I went to New York in 2006, because I wasn't viewing the pictures, paintings and other art from an open mind.

Now that I have a bit of a background in photography, these pictures were very interesting. Most of what I was interested in was how fine grained the shots were, I use a high grain film made even higher since I mostly expose my film for 800 speed instead of its 400 ISO rating, and trying to figure out his reasoning for picking a specific location or point of view of the location.

There were quite a few pictures that I don't even think modern photographers would do, like this one of blurred bowlers and this double exposure right next to it. I also liked this long perspective shot. I understand that these pictures were for a magazine, but was not able to get an opinion on the point of these pictures other than to show the diverse and incredibly vast differences in lifestyles in as little as 10 miles apart. He caught these people living in ridiculously small trailers in Santa Monica, then went over to the densely populated Downtown and then to what looks like homes in Beverly Hills. He also spent a bit of time over at Lockheed in Burbank.

All in all, this was a very interesting Gallery series that had its ups and downs with what I found to be interesting. All the links go to thumbnails from the Drkrm website but you can view larger versions of the pictures at their website drkrm.com. The exhibit is around for two more weekends. It ends on March 17th, so if you have yet to see it, or would like to see it again, I suggest you get over there. There is no telling when It will be viewed again.

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.