DESG* You're slacking off....

*DESG is the Duarte East Side Gang and that band of arists had been doing some really amazing work under the trestles of the pedestrian path between Duarte and the San Gabriel River Trail in Irwindale. Don't know what happened but all their art has been pretty much tagged over and erased into oblivion. Of course the constant over painting is nothing new which is why urban art in the wild is so transient. Those boys need to get busy and entertain me again.

Interesting, but a trend I've seen more in the inner portions of LA has appeared up here. That's stencil art and here it says "monkee love". Don't know what it means and not sure I'm curious enough to google it.

HDR works really well here in bringing in all the detail under the trestle and still not blow out to oblivian the highlights from the light sand in the burning sun. Shot with the trust EOS20d, Raw bracketed +/- 2 stops with the trusty 20-35mm wide angle, HDR and tonemapped in Photomatix then run through the Virtual Photographer in CS2.

Anyway...here you go urban art in the wild along the dried up San Gabriel River

Pointillists for piece

Back to the impressionists track again. I've been thinking about that whole group again and wound up going back to the old autochromes when I looked at a link that brought a view to my blog here in the first place. Before I forget, Happy 100th Birthday on the marketing of Autochromes!

That link in itself was interesting as it is part of a group of traditional photographers group called Analog Photography Users Group or Apug. I cruised through them and saw some really interesting stuff. This group is dedicated to all things silver which they call "analog". A few of them are finding ways to make those autochrome films for use now but haven't been able to find the right combo of ingredients. Sigh.....

Anyway what struck me odd is that so much of the autochromes that exist belong to the French Army archives...they used it to document WWI so they have been well prepreserved. The images I found link hopping are interesting, very different images of war, romanticized by the look of the autochrome film. Click Ministry or WWI Color to see the archives.

So here I am looking at my HDR stuff from the weekend and the light went off once again. I loved the look of autochromes, color shifts withstanding, and always marveled how much they reminded me of the work of the pointillists of that period in the early 1900's. Always funny how art and technology wind out getting melded and influence each other. Using some HDR image made it possible to even keep shadow and highlights full of info for a more complete image. Anyway...down that road I went.

Enjoy "Santa Monica Pier" and "Alone in a Crowd" done in an impressionists style using modern tools to imitate a photographic process some 100 years old! Oh yeah, the pun...pointillists give you pieces of color, bombs blow it into pieces and artists usually rally for peace.

Happy 100...in HDR of course

If the trusty counter is correct I've blither blathered here for the 100th time with this post. As it grows it makes sense I use one of my newer explorations, HDR to celebrate.

No news that I am more than a little enamored and curious about HDR as a tool to help a photographer. Whether it be realistic images or so far off into the surreal and impressionistic there is a lot it can do.

This morning I spent quite a bit of time working on some seascapes I shot in HDR while at Santa Monica Pier yesterday. I am frustrated as when there are super bright hot spots from the sun bouncing off the water at low angles the program wants to black it out with a darker portion form another frame. I suspect since the ocean is moving and the 3 frames are just microseconds apart this movement is tossing off the program in extreme contrast areas. How to work with it is my next task. Right now it looks like a lot of flotsam in the bay, and though Santa Monica Bay isn't the cleanest body of water out there, it certainly is better than my pics so far showed. I suspect that this will be an area where the surreal advantages outweigh the real. We shall see.

The ghosting part as objects move around in the frame during the sequence is fun. Adds to the tension and illusion of energy when there is ghosted movement. HDR is funny as it ghosts fainter in the direction of travel so it starts to look like a predictor of movement rather than the usual showing where its gone. Fun to work with.

Anyway...one HDR of the roller coaster. Enjoy and now its back to work here....

Its all about dynamic tension...

Composition is all about contrasts in color, light/dark and line to produce tension and dynamics to stimulate your brain. A bunch of carnival rides gives you lines, repeating lines and arcs as well as some bold color. The latter done on purpose to get your attention and keep you excited and stimulated. Great psychology on the designers part, even more fun as a photographer to meander through and shoot the scene from the totality of it all down to the minute' of details. Enjoy these few tidbits shot at the Santa Monica Pier over the weekend.

Its fun to just shoot



Things get pretty good when all you have to do is wander around a pier, camera in tow and just enjoy the scenery. Here's just a little sampling of the stuff seen in the arcades on the Santa Monica Pier. I just love the overly saturated color and texture of these prizes. Even how they display them is entertaining at times...all nicely hung stopping just short of being drawn and quartered...sheesh!

Shrek was here...

Just a little amuse bouche for the eyeballs. Spent the day at Santa Monica Pier just shooting and enjoying an absolutely perfect So Cali June day with no June Gloom...IE Sunny and 72. Does life get better than this? A little Shrek doing the Kilroy routine that just cracked me up in the arcades is your little treaty for the evening.

Anyway...I got all the images sorted into basic categories and will be posting more once I work up a few during the course of the next day or so....

Just a quick stroll through the garden....

Abraham Lincoln in Bud
Cluster of Royal Wedding English Roses
But closer on a Royal Wedding blossom as it unfolds
Very close look into Royal Wedding

A camera in the garden is a good way to avoid having to work or do anything constructive in the garden. Its an excuse to just enjoy.

Abraham Lincoln is a hybrid tea I bought when I first started growing roses. Its a nice very deep red variety dating back to 1964. That means its old enough that it still smells like a rose...

The "Royal Wedding" falls into the category of an "English Rose" but actually was developed here in So Cal over in Thousand Oaks by a breeder by the name of Keith Zachary and available through Weeks Roses several years ago. It starts out on the apricot side of pink as it begins to unfold and fades to pale pink at the end of its cycle. It is extremely fragrant and has very large fully cupped blossoms. Outstanding left on the bush or cut and put in a vase. The latter option perfumes the house for days.

English Roses are really the rubenesque variety in my gardens. Big, bold, vivacious, bosomy about as good as it gets in the rose world for me. Walking through the garden when they are all in full flush is like walking through a brothel on bath night...and smells about as good!

Look...ornaments everywhere and it ain't Christmas! Yesterday I met an old friend and we went off to lunch in the Silver Lake area, Tropical Cafe was the name of the place. Cuban deli and highly recommend their classic Cuban Sandwich. Very good. Very Cheap...and no lines like you find at Porto's in Glendale.

I got invited to blog on the blogging.la site a couple of weeks ago. Invited because I was commenting on stuff and in short terrorizing a few judging by the reactions. But I did it to be the devil's advocate and make people think a bit. The cool thing is that I have met some cool new people in the deal. People cross our paths for a reason and its always good to let them in and see what develops.

One of the bloggers has tagged me in a meme game. Its sorta like the chain letter emails 'cept you just post on your own and wait for them to tag you back. The rules...

So -- the tagging/meme -- Here are the rules:
1: Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2: People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3: At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4: Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
Since I got tagged by Julia...she can now see I responded. I don't have 8 fellow bloggers in my chain yet so I guess there's a few lucky souls out there.

My 8:
1. I have lived in LA longer than anywhere else my entire life...22 years and counting.
2. I believe art should match your soul not your sofa.
3. My first drunk was with my best friends and the Parish priest on our 8th grade retreat.
4. Psychopharmacology has its purpose...just in small doses over short periods of time. Gimme a reset button in the form of a Benzodiazepine and all is well with the world in short order.
5. I love the Dr. Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell.
6. I own most of what Hunter S Thompson has written...I reread "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" often to remember to question the writers baggage and politics in general. (Maybe this is where I got the wild hair to support the whole states rights, Sage Brush Rebellion in the 80's)
7. I have no problem stirring the pot and watching it boil. Thats why blogs were a godsend for my id and ego.
8. I have no credit cards...I can't be trusted with the damn things.

So there you go my random 8. Now which of the group will shock you is the bigger question.

To the following...you've been tagged
Julia at http://juliasbookshelf.blogspot.com/ who tagged me first
Rutz at http://ruth666.blogspot.com/
Will at http://www.wildbell.com/
Coop at http://positiveapeindex.blogspot.com/

So there you go...follow them, follow me but get a laugh or pause to think of your own random stuff. Now if there was just a way to include my flickr buds in this....

Talk to you all again soon, 'puter is back after a quick detour back to the shop for a new sound card so its time to get busy again...

Rattlesnakes sure put a damper on things...

I took a run up to the West Fork of the San Gabriel River and Canyon late this morning just for a break from the gray skies of the LA Basin socked in again with June Gloom. Very nice day for a hike and to enjoy the warm sun up in the mountains. The downside is that every rattlesnake and its young'ns had the same thought. It is just no fun walking around when all you see is those critters, or worse hear them but don't see them. Ended my visit short as I was not dressed appropriately for meandering around snake country.

I did however have enough time before discovering those critters to get out a bit and enjoy the sounds of the river rushing over rocks and the winds whistling up the canyon.

HDR can go so many ways. Real or Surreal. Today I used it to fill in the shadows with detail normally lost when shooting realistic landscapes. Short version is I shot all today with the Canon EF Ultrasonic 20-35MM, mostly at max wide angle for the all encompassing view and distortion in angle to get as much of the scene as possible. I used Aperture mode for the metering, f16 and the camera took care of the 3 images +/- 2 stops to get me the Raw files needed. After running through Photomatix, CS2 and Virtual Photographer I dumbed them down and resized to fit here.

Enjoy 3 views of the West Fork of the San Gabriel River Canyon.

I hate sodium vapor lights...

Those blasted super bright, overly orange lights are the curse of night photography, unless of course you are going for that clockwork orange nuclear afterglow. Aside from the light pollution issues, its just not natural. No matter how you try you just can't get it colors shifted back as it is completely lacking in the blue end of the spectrum. Argh...mix it in with the unearthly glow of a fluorescent bulb, which lacks much in the red end of the spectrum,and there is no hope of balancing for a natural appearance to your lighting.

But all is not lost when you are going for the surreal. When you have multiple sources each with their own color base it takes some experimenting but you can work with overall color filtration and emphasize one or the other. At least its not an insurmountable hurdle if you are running down that path. It would however be nice if the cities could decide to use one type of light source consistently to make life a bit easier. With the surreal and impressionistic being one of my favorite paths to hurdle down you can tell which way I went this morning.

These images were shot with the EOS20d, shot Raw in AV mode f8, EV neutral and +/- 2 stops. The RAW files were combined with the Photomatix Pro, then tonemapped converted to 8 bit for the final filtering and run through Virtual Photographer. Ah....so many steps but still immensely easier than the old dip and dunk days and hours spent dialing in a tidge more cyan, blue or whatever.

Enjoy "Tromp L'oeil Plane" and "Shamrock Gassed" the end result of my late evening meanderings in Monrovia yesterday.

HDR and Dusk are kinda magic....

Since I did my first series of HDR images at Dusk I've been more than a little intrigued by how it can go either very impressionistic and surreal to very literal. Tonight I broke down and went down to an old Gas Station dating back to Monrovia's Route 66 Days. The station has been there since Monrovia had an airfield in the 1920's. It is a bit of history that remains and I figured this might be a good time to document it and experiment with the HDR.

In a bit of a flight of fancy I shot this wanting to blend in the real and surreal. For you techy kinds I shot it RAW, Average metering with an f8 Average value and ISO 400. The trusty 38-200 lense was used at a focal length of 50mm with shutter speeds of 3.2, 8 and 13 seconds. I used Photomatix Tonemapping for the HDR generation. I then finished it up with CS2 and the Virtual Photographer plug-in after it was converted down to 8bit jpeg. Then....I took that monster file and print down to 72 bit in a final size to fit better here which means a lot of subtle detail is lost...but blah blah blah...you get the idea.

Enjoy "Shamrock Gas" with the promise of more from tonights shoot to follow.

Tonemapping = Micromanaging...in a good way!

Recently while cruising the FlickrHDR I stumbled across an interesting subgroup "Flickr Tone Mapped". This interesting group tonemaps images but not from HDR files, rather from their single exposure files. It got my attention and I decided to see what I could do with it.

Working from single exposure RAW (CR2 in Canon speak) files I used the Photomatix Tonemapping plug-in instead of Photoshop's as it give me more control and better results. From there I was able to micromanage many variables much like I did back in the dip and dunk days in the dark room. End result is that micromanaging your image in the PC rivals some of the stuff you could do with silver based imaging. Not the same breadth of detail you see in HDR but very controlled traditional imagery

Both of these were images were shot with the EOS20d, aperture value "f8" with the 28-200MM USM lense with evaluative metering in the RAW mode. Final images were dumbed down to 8bit, resized for here in jpeg format. Yes, detail is lost in the process but you get a good idea of the final image.

For you gardeners out there the purple rose is "Route 66" shrub rose developed by Weeks Roses that I got simply because it is a deep purple, unusual for roses. The pinky rose is a David Austin English Rose "Mary Rose" which I have had for years and keep trimmed way back. It fades from deep pink to light pink as the bloom progresses from bud to spent.

Summer Flowers Arrived a bit early this year....



The Agapanthus bloomed about 3 weeks early this year, don't know why but they did. Even the trusty Sweet Alyssum is going strong.

The last sign of summer is the Trumpet Horn vine hiding the back fence with its buds that look like a lipstick pushed all the way out is getting ready to bloom. That means butterflies and bees will be taking over the bush as soon as they discover them.

Today was our first bright morning in a while, put aside the yard work and just wandered around the gardens enjoying all the color and stuff.

Hope your day has started out as well as mine!

May Gray slides into June Gloom..What a month its been, will save you the boring details but the short of it is I was swamped the last few weeks of May. Just as well as May was a lot grayer than usual and June is keeping true to form as well. The 'puter is back up and running (2 Gigs of RAM now to better handle the HDR stuff) and picked up an interesting sidebar activity as a writer on blogging.la

Anyway today I finally got my self out of the house and ventured out to the San Gabriel River along the bike paths in Duarte and Irwindale. Nice place to hang even if the river has been turned off for 8 months already.

This spring was so dry that there is virtually nothing blooming. Even the cacti are barely going this year. Not even the usual gaggle of geese and duckies around as everything is baked dry.

What was blooming was some of the Century Plants, members of the aloe and agave family, but you can't make tequila or anything good from them, they just look cool. Interesting plant, kind of like a spiky leaved palm at ground level and at the end of its life it sends up this 12-15 foot tall flower spike. After the bloom is done it dies and as it rots provides nutrients for the seedlings that will come in subsequent years.

Today's pic is one of those flower spikes, all fluffy and soft. I did a little color correcting after converting it from raw to tiff. Then I ran it through the virtual photographer to give it more of an old timey slide look (Sorry no HDR this time around). For you technical types I shot it RAW with the EOS20d, no noise suppression on. Shot it with my trusty 28-200mm zoom at the 28mm focal length, ISO 400 at f8 at 1/1250 second.

gigabytes are cheap...

I had this bright idea today to see what would happen if you simply adjusted a normally exposed raw file +2 and -2 EV with the raw processor that comes bundled with the EOS20d and save myself some card space when out shooting. In theory you should be able to manufacture the exposure range needed for creating an HDR file then using tone mapping to bring about an image with detail across the board.

I found out the hard way funky stuff happens, especially when you make the conversion down to 8bits and into jpeg. You start getting noise and other bizarre artifacts that leave you with something that has colorshifted and lost detail. My suspicion is that the simple act of altering ev with a program isn't giving me the detail at other end, rather its just lightening it all up. When its married into an hdr format you pick up too much conflict and the program simply starts doing an "either/or/nor" routine. End result is a picture that is marginal in the detail picked up in the extremes of the gray scale and way too much loss of detail. More than I am willing to live with at least.

So....gigabytes are cheap do the 3 or more exposures needed and let your programs work with the date the way it was intended. An 8 gig card still takes a lot to fill it up even when shooting 3 raw images of each scene.

Anyway..from a recent photo shoot, a nice stretch of the Angeles Crest Highway. Shot RAW and converted to jpeg and smallified to fit here.

I bought Art....

Yeah, I know its a fine line between collecting and stalking. A friend of mine here at MAFA is also an incredible painter. Rick Kess has worked for disney studios as an illustrator for years, and more recently as a modeler for other film companies. Great guy. Great wit. Please forgive the crappy camera phone photo, but you get the gist of it all...tiki, olives and martini's total ode to the 1960's cocktail hour!

Anyway...after a few glasses of a really nice siraz my check book was adequately loosened, as was my better half, and I partook in the auction with the Monrovia Art Festival Association.

I am now a proud owner of a totally classic and witt Rick Kess Original...not a giclee'...but the honest to gawd original. The painting is roughly 18 X 24, acrylic on canvas and titled "Courrier and Olives". It will grace my studio walls 10 months out of the year...the other 2 it will grace my mantle. I think it is even cooler than "Last Supper" which I still lust over.

Now if I can scrape together the cash for a Coop original I'd be in total heaven, not that his significant other Rutz (and college buddy) hasn't already fixed me up with a few goodies already over the years, I may just be complete.

That said, the MAFA "Acknowledge the Arts" was a roaring success and certainly raised some funds to help the group further art education and appreciation in the community.

By the Way..did I tell you I am the "featured artist" for the July 28th Art Walk in Monrovia this year. Details to follow as I find out what it all entails.

Spring Color Explosion continues...
Love my roses, especially the first flush of the year. The cold, below freezing week in January has made my garden the most colorful and prolific that is has been in years. My favs still are the English Roses as they have the most incredible old rose scents. Hybrid Teas are just a pain in the butt and the breeding to get them to be so colorful and repeat blooming has cause them to all but lose their scent. Not a good trait to lose in my book! Anyway...enjoy the few I shot this morning!
Shropshire Lass...a David Austin English Rose...blooms only once, beautiful single that reminds of the wild roses in the great lakes states when I was a kid:

Graham Thomas, another Austin English Rose, I really like those deep yellows more than any other color. Don't know why, I just do!

Midas Touch, one of the few Hybrid Teas I have in the garden....chose it because it's yellow. The unfortunate part is that like so many other hybrid teas it has little fragrance.

Double Delight..the other hybrid tea in my garden, chose because of the color draw back is that it has very little fragrance.

And here we go...the results from yesterdays hike up in the San Gabriel Mountains in the Alder Creek Canyon Area. Nice place to spend a sunny day! All postprocessed in HDR, Photomatix Tone mapping and Virtual Photographer. Enjoy!

Too nice to be real

While many panic at the thought of us having a "red flag" as it means high fire danger and if you are in a designated neighborhood parking is restricted so that emergency crews can get in to put out fires.

For me it means I get a beautiful warm day. Today is such a day....nice breeze, brilliant sun and its now debate time whether I should do my gardening or go up somewhere and shoot. Stay tuned, if I get out shooting I'll get the results posted later today.

It's been busy around here. I debuted my "Abandoned Church, Paris" at the Paint-n-Play Gallery reception on Friday night. Nicely received...but that doesn't always translate into a sale. Will have to watch, wait and see what happens.

Don't forget that this Saturday is the Monrovia Art Festival Association's "Acknowledge the Arts" event at the local tennis club. I blogged it a few weeks ago.... http://frazgomeanders.blogspot.com/2007/04/blog-post.html

Enjoy the flags this morning at the gas station...all nicely back lit against a crisp sky....I'll be outside one way or another today to enjoy it! Took it with my Che-ez Snap while filling up this morning.

Playing Hooky and So Cal is a good place to do it...




It was one of those days, overcast "June Gloom" early for the season and I needed sunshine. Luckily a very few minutes away is the San Gabriel Mountains and the Angeles Crest and Angeles Forest Highways. The mountains trap in the clouds when we have on "onshore flow" or winds blowing off the ocean into the basin leaving us foggy or cloudy depending where we are.

Rather than the usual tasks I played hooky this morning. Dropped my favorite 80's mix CD in place as there is no radio in the mountains and off I went. Simple route with stops to shoot. Up the 2 to the Mountains, a quick left onto the Angeles Forest towards Palmdale, across the bridge and right after the Mediation Temple you make a right onto Upper Big Tujunga and a right onto Angeles Crest and a few short miles on that you are back in the city. There were lots of detours, some places I haven't found the names yet googling, others such as Alder Creek Canyon can't be missed. Of course fun old tunes make zipping through the corners and the uphill swoops even more fun...its all in the rhythm.

Anyway, shot it all in HDR, post processed with Adobe's Photoshop CS2 and the Virtual Photographer. Great tools to capture one of my most favorite places to roam! Hope you enjoyed them.

Its been as much fun as Christmas around here...

Today was one of those blah days, can't shake that stomach bug that I have managed to pick up along with a few other neighbors. Not enough to lay me out, just slowing me down.

Gorgeous day here and unfortunately I wasn't up to getting out. So....I dug through my library of images of nearby Monrovia Canyon and the waterfalls. I shot several about a month ago and just didn't have the skills with HDR to merge them where they looked natural. Well, natural in terms of registration and final picture.

I'm getting the hang of tone-mapping. When I work with these digital photographs I tend to recreate them with the look of Kodachrome, at least the look of those done in the early years through the 60's when they tended to be deeper saturated emphasising the warmer tones more than the cool. (Later films like Kodachrome 25/64 and later were still deeply saturated but more neutral in rendition which did very well in the commercial marketplace...but lacked the character in my humble opinion of the earlier films).

So I took some time today working up a few of the images controlling the micro contrasts and saturation a bit, running them through virtual photographer and its various tools to mimic those wonderful old Kodachrome's of yore and get images that look like they popped out of a 1940 and 50's era National Geographic.

HDR is a real life saver with Digital. Gives one so much more range in terms of tonal scale that you can focus on greater detail in the shadows and highlights and still have a balance within your darks and brights. Love it, especially when I can use it to share with the viewer what I saw rather than what the camera simply recorded. Its a real life jacket in capturing scenes where you have light rocks and a waterfall deep in a very steep dark canyon...like Monrovia Canyon Falls.

Enjoy "Monrovia Canyon Dawn" and "Monrovia Canyon Falls" and its off to bed for me now!

Ghosts in the foreground...and a reschedule

Working with Photomatix tonemapping again today...I really like the control it gives you. In the end you need to switch from HDR formatting to JPEG files for the web so you lose some details and clarity, but even then when dumbed down and downsized for the web the results are pretty amazing.

Shooting for HDR creates an interesting situation I call "Ghosting". Ghosting for lack of a better term is when you have movement of items within your subject and it can't be helped as you need 3 frames of the same subject at different exposures. People are notorious for moving, go figure. Wind causes movement too most noticeable in small tree limbs. I'm actually starting to dig the ghosting...its like a picture Paul Strand made back in the 1920's where he in the dark room removed people and left their shadows in place in a shot he did in New York (I think it may have been near Times Square...just can't find a copy of the image on the web). Kind of eerie to see something man made in all its permanence with man himself just a wisp moving through.

Anyway, the other bit of news is I have a bit of a flu bug and I need to cancel tonight's appearance at the PnP Gallery here in town. Luckily we can do it next Friday,May 4, 6-9:30 PM. The info if you need it : 418 S Myrtle Avenue, Monrovia 91016. (It's located in the heart of Old Town Monrovia, 2 doors down from the Movie Theatres).

Anyway enjoy the "Ghosts of Westminster" shot in London earlier this month.