Chinatown In LA

It's hard for me to believe sometimes that there are areas of Downtown Los Angeles that I haven't visited yet. But I set out to for one that I've been wanting to see for many years. I decided on checking it out after seeing an article in the AAA magazine for Orange County, Westways, and they had an article showing different spots to check out in Downtown LA. They were Little Tokyo Restaurants, Art galleries in old Chinatown Store fronts, and an old fascination of mine, Old Theaters in Downtown LA.

The window of the Metro Blue Line train I took into town.

Chinatown is the area just north of the 101 Freeway and right below Chavez Ravine (aka Dodger Stadium, the inferior LA Baseball team). Its a very unique location for sure. The area started off as Little Italy. In fact there is still a standing building smack in the middle that was one of the more popular Italian restaurants of from that era.

There is a neat little shopping center in the center that has several shops with a WIDE variety of items, cool little hole in the wall restaurants, and other decorations to make the place look authentic.

That area was probably the most interesting of the whole Chinatown section. There were some other interesting places like the store you buy poultry at. much of the popular sights such as the cool entrance on Hill has now been impeded by tall buildings.

But thats what happens in the 2nd largest city. If you see sky, there must be something wrong.

Chinatown in Downtown LA is well worth the 5 second Metro Gold Line ride from Union Station. You won't find many other places like it. The only other chinatowns that could compare or be even better are the ones in New York and San Francisco, but that's just my opinion. Check it out.

To see some of my older works as well as what I'm currently working on, check out my gallery site timeside.smugmug.com or my portfolio othersideoftime.weebly.com

Thanks for stopping by, and see y'all on my next adventures.

Noguchi Park

I have one more set of photos from 2012 that I've been sitting on for at least two months now. I have no idea why I haven't posted them yet, but that's not really a big issue. As many of you know by now, I am a big fan of parks. I tend to stick with regional parks as they offer wonderful nature trails in an utterly boring urban environment.

This park is an incredibly designed concrete park that was built smack dab in the middle of a corporate complex in Costa Mesa, CA. It was designed by Japanese architect Isamu Noguchi. The park is called California Scenario or Noguchi Gardens.

To me, it looked like a combination of a well constructed business park mixed with a Japanese zen garden that mostly included concrete. It was very peaceful as well, but that might have been because it was on a Sunday that we went down there. On the other hand, its devoid of color, but the little stream and the contrasting objects more than made up for it. Well worth to see if you are a park fan like I am.

My buddy charlie, he was trying to do a super mario jump. Boing!

Toy Camera - Unlikely Outcomes

What better of a way to start out on my new year than to write about something that Chris mentioned in the comments of my last post. I went to El Dorado Nature Trail back in November to see if I could get any fall colors. 

I haven't shot color film yet with my medium format, so I was stuck between Fuji Portra 400 C-41 or Fuji Velvia 100 Color slide film. I didn't have a light meter yet and I heard slide film is a bit harder to get correct lighting shots so I went with the easier color negative film, the portra. I also took three rolls of Ilford hp5+ black and white film, which are what the shots below were taken with.

This first set demonstrates one of the good mishaps that can happen when you shoot with a Holga. I accidentally forgot to set the camera back to the 100x shutter speed setting and left it on the Bulb setting. The bulb setting will leave the shutter open for as long as you have your finger on the shutter release. So, most of them below look like they have some motion blur or they have a couple different exposures of the same scene. I got about 3/4 of the way through  Which is where the set on the bottom come in.

Now this set was the weird ones in the bunch. I'd never seen this happen before. I had two mistakes happen on these next few.The first are the big white streaks  Those are light leaks from when I was transferring the film from the spool to the development tank. I accidentally dropped the spool, when I was in my makeshift darkroom, in front of the crack at the bottom of the door. There was a bit of light coming in down there. Major bummer.

The other issue was when I developed the film, my stock developer liquid was just a bit too strong and I agitated the container too much. Your supposed to do either 10 second agitation per minute or 5 seconds every 30 seconds. Well, on some of them I was doing 10 every 30 seconds. That's why the pictures look a little dull underneath.

Well there ya have it. I think I'll do the first mistake again. I was showing a co worker, whom was a former pro photographer, those pictures and he thought they were good enough to be framed and hung. I think I might just do that. Especially with the 2nd image of the little bridge. Experimenting in your hobby's teaches you big time!