Oddities

There is something barren about this place, and having lived here for several years now I can see why I'm reminded so often of those science fiction movies I watched as a kid in the '70s. The Civic Center (does anyone who does not work downtown know what the Civic Center is?!), which in most other major cities would be a hive of activity, is a relatively desolate place, especially after 5 or 5.30. City Hall East, right, in particular gives off the air of a futuristic set from a utopian film from a generation or more ago, especially after dark and after hours.

Architecturally unimaginative (to be kind), it's sole appeal is in the large murals (are they mosaics?) above either entrance. At night, when the workers are gone and the harsh fluorescents are lighting the Los Angeles Street side, it's at its most eerie.

Even leaving work at the relatively early hour of 6 in winter L.A. provides the unusual (for me, still) mix of dark, balmy evenings. When I got to the parking lot the other night it wasn't all that surprising that a large swath of it had been taken over by a film crew. The image I hoped to capture was the incongruity of this set they'd built - a cafe or diner, I think - as an island in this vast asphalt lot. What it looks more like, though, is that there's some great conflagration going on, another example of the Treo's preference for the dark.

Another interesting feature, a fiction really, is the shutter noise of the camera. There is none, but when the phone is set to "ring" it does allow the camera to give off a "click." A benefit to the silence is that I was able to stand behind this homeless guy heading toward Skid Row and take a photo of him without the noise that might have tipped him off that I was even there. Of course, the street noise probably would have taken care of that, but why risk it?

A party

Two of my favorite images were made last Saturday night at the housewarming party of friends in Los Feliz. The pool photo I think is another that would have worked just as well - indeed better - with a larger format and better lens. It just struck me as, well, a really sensual image.


The other, a long view of the party, brought me back to L.A. It's hard to tell in the photograph, but the adults are weighted to the right and the kids were all jammed into the room on the first floor left, totally mesmerized by a movie. It also helped to make the point that the woman silhouetted in the kitchen doorway had skinny legs, and I'm a bit surprised that the Treo's lens picked that up.

Good light

All that said, there's great light here.
Especially at the end of the day.

About Los Angeles

What really prompted this effort was a longstanding interest in photographing Los Angeles. The challenge, if I wanted to do it well, in a meaningful way, was to find something to say visually about L.A. A lot has been said, much of it restating what was said when the city really started to expand (I was tempted to say blossom) and be taken seriously in the 1950s. I sent the URL for this site to my uncle, who kindly observed that "Your camera eye sees little bits of beauty momentarily here and there in a broadly unbeautiful cityscape." It dawned on me that that was, in fact, what I'd been trying to capture when I started thinking about how L.A. might be rendered through my lenses.

I've never really been one to photograph people, and it dawns on me that Los Angeles suits that inclination quite well. There aren't that many people to get in the way of the cityscape. There is, indeed, something barren about the place. It has to do with the cars, the sprawl. Sure. It is, at its heart, a lonely, barren place. When I first moved here from the East, it felt as if I'd been dropped into Atlantic City in late September: the crowds were gone, the weather was good and the streets were empty. Endless fall.

The image up top is the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue, right against the big Korean church there, and was taken mid-morning on a recent weekend. If you open it up to a larger screen the shadows look like they spell Vanessa. This is one that would have worked well, I think, in film.

The other two were just shot today, in the middle of the day, as I drove to and from a performance at my son's school. The image on the left is Beverly Boulevard in the Larchmont area, the right was taken on Fairfax, heading south toward Beverly.

Not everything works

Despite being car-bound most of the time I'm out, I do get a chance to go out on foot downtown once in a while. Not far from the office, they are demolishing the old CalTrans building. The old Ficus have been preserved, and they hung netting across the frame of the old building to, I imagine, help keep debris from flying all over. I was struck by the image of the green trees against the dark tarp. With a better camera - a better lens and better control over the aperture, this might have been a good photo. As it is, it was a lesson in the limitations of the Treo's camera. Interestingly, the camera tends to work better in low light - even no light in some cases - than it does in bright sun

One example of that, taken a day or two after the CalTrans experiment, is a picture of City Hall taken - again from the car as I was stopped at a light - on the way home from work. In this case, the limitations of the fixed aperture and shutter speed make for an interesting photo, I think. The result is among my favorite images taken with the little machine.

The car

This being Los Angeles, I spend more time in the car than I do on foot. There was a time when I kept a camera in the car, looking for interesting things as they struck me (or waiting to get rear-ended and catch the hit-and-run driver). But being in a hurry seems to go hand-in-hand with being in the car, along with a certain amount of inconvenience in terms of stopping. It also happens that if I see something interesting it is generally from the perspective of the center of the street. All those things added up to having little use for the camera. Enter the 650. It's sitting there next to me anyway, relatively easy to engage.

There has always been something about Sunset Boulevard heading out of downtown on the way to Hollywood. Maybe it's the grittier mix of architecture, businesses and people, but I really like it. The Brite Spot restaurant looks like one of those places that's easier to romanticize for not having gone there, but I like the way it's tucked into its lot against a much larger context. And I'm almost always stuck at a red light there.

What this is about

I've had a Palm Treo 650 for a few months, and after a bit of noodling with all the bells and whistles I'd settled into a routine of relatively limited use for all its functions.

But lately I've been fascinated with its little camera, and have started shooting things around L.A. that strike me as interesting visually to see how they come out. What got me thinking about it seriously is the image at right, a shot of the sunset as I was driving home one fall night West on Franklin Avenue. It struck me as a typical sort of L.A. thing - the cars, the sunset, the palm trees. Then my brother pointed out that it was more typically L.A. for being shot with a cell phone.
I started looking at these images in a new way, and went back to one I'd taken a few days earlier of my son climbing out a friend's pool.