A little life imitating art

Sometimes, just sometimes you manage to get the details right by waiting a bit. Cropping helps too. I spotted the worker on an earlier pass but the shadows weren't right to make the image "work" the way I wanted with the tromp l'oeil on the side of this buidling in Venice Beach that was getting a little touch up work done. A couple of hours passed and lo-and-behold the artist doing the work moved his ladder up higher AND the sun moved enough that the shadows matched direction.

Call it all in the planning for the shadows, stroke of luck with the artist moving his ladder up higher.

Still Experimenting with HDR and movement.

This time around I brought along a tripod. It does make it easier to control background aligning but its the frozen to one spot that is killing me. I didn't do well on a leash when I was 2, much less now at this advanced age.

The results are more satisfying in spite of being tied to a spot with a tripod. Exploration continues, now to find some other sports to focus on. As always 3 shots bracketed with Photomatix doing the HDR generation and tonemapping. Final clean up with CS2 and Virtual Photographer to bring on the more surreal aspects.

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

Water sports and surfer stuff

Shooting surfers and others playing on the water on a bright sunny day is a challenge as the contrast is so much higher than your media can record you run the risk of losing shadow details completely or blowing out your highlights. Shooting on a gray end of winter day solves the contrast issue...there is next to none, but you loose color saturation and your color shift blue. All an easy fix in the day of photoshop.

Shooting things out in the water are tough as you don't have the usual elements like trees or buildings to set up framing and provide visual cues to scale. You do get lines running about, converging or splitting that help you frame and come up with cues that the viewer uses to establish scale. Allowing waves to curl, bend on their own and wait for the right moment to snap the shutter is time consuming but it does make the difference in the final image....drama for the idea draws the viewer in and that is your reward. Of course, just watching the waves is a nice way to relax so the image can be the added bonus.

Enjoy the Venice Beach surfers and boogey boarders from earlier in the day today.

No Airbus A380...but I got the beach instead

Aye carumba, the commute gawds and those that govern nerdy events like the A380 landing at LAX were not in sync. It took me nearly 2 hours to get to LAX...I was just blocks from parking and viewing when it passed overhead. The thing is huge, it was early and as I was in the middle of a turn in traffic I couldn't even grab the camera phone to snap a pic. Damn....did I tell you it was huge? It looked like a mini-strip mall on wings gliding out of the overcast skies. Amazing.

Anyway, all was not lost. I was minutes from Venice Beach, my personal mecca for spiritual renewal and I headed there next.

For a winter day there was plenty of stuff to see and do. The skies were heavy overcast which affects the color of light. IE it tends to be bluer, less saturated and less contrast. In the old days you would stick on a warming filter if you were shooting slide film that would return some resemblance to natural color to the scene and work with the lack of contrast and saturation. Luckily those days are past and we can enlist photoshop to address those areas simple filters can't.

Venice in my book is one of those rare places where all sorts of humanity converge, co-exist for but a moment and feed of each others energies. (It's also a great place to take your relatives from the mid-western and plains states so they can see the slice of life that can shock and awe but I am wandering off topic). Anyway, the people, the color and the energy always bring me back refreshed in spite of the traffic I have to slog through.

I shot a lot of stuff today, little stuff, big stuff, surfer stuff, street stuff and will need to put it all up sort of by themes.