Urban Art in the wild

Living at the edge of the LA Metro area I do have a lot of wilderness close by. I'm not the only who ventures a few blocks from home to enjoy the outdoors.

In Duarte at their Encanto Park there is an old railroad bridge that connects it with the San Gabriel River Trail that you can use to bike all the way to Long Beach if you desire. The bridge is all nicely paved and now that the river has been off for nearly a year (not sure who or why they did it, but its LA Baby and you roll with nature being shut off) so its possible to walk under it. For years even when the river ran the Duarte East Side Gang and some other groups have been decorating and putting their own mark on the undersides of the bridge. I think DESG is gone as the incredible murals are painted and tagged over. Sad to see their art go as the tagging usually doesn't bode well.

I do have to admit that this is my favorite time of year to shoot. Now through the end of October the sun isn't as high and the resulting color shifts to the redder side of the spectrum really accentuate the warm tones of a scene. Add in the natural fading of greens as fall approaches things really warm up a bit. Late afternoon and early morning this is most noticeable and is the reason I do so much shooting at those times of day.

I shot these bracketed with 2 stops over/under exposure using the EOS 20d with an ultra wide angle to capture as much of the scene as possible and add some linear distortion. I used the 3 RAW files to generate HDR files that were tonemapped and run through Virtual Photographer to get to the final images seen here.

Visual amuse-bouche

Ages ago (like 1984) there was a B-Movie, "Buckaroo Bonzai" and one of my favorite lines went something like "no matter where you go there you are..." . Travelling opens your eyes up to the world and it sometimes isn't so much the differences but the similarities that strike me.

Meandering around London and Paris there was so much to see and tease your eyes. Its kind of hard walking along these ancient cobbled pathes and not think about who walked in the very path you traversed during the dark ages. Like here in LA graffiti and other urban art like "stenciling can be found", just has its own twists. A few little tidbits for your own visual stimulation....

Icons and graffiti

Venice has this really cool area where local graffiti artists can paint to their hearts content on some short concrete walls and cones that remind me some how of the Moai from the Easter Islands.

The palm tree is one of the icons of California cultivated in tv and movies...you've seen it, palm tree lined streets, palm tree lined pools, palm tree lined beaches...you get the picture.

Add in some color and they change their character completely. At Venice today there is an area where even the trees weren't safe from the graffiti artists cans and they became more than an icon, they became art all onto their own right playing into the scene.

One thing that struck me while meandering about was this scene were an elderly woman was parked on the edge of the basketball courts under the palms. I can't tell you why the scene haunted me, but it did and I grabbed a shot of it too.

Without out further blather on my part...LA Icons, the palm trees