A dreary day at the skate park

I rode my bike down to Venice Beach on Sunday, as I usually do, but this particular Sunday was unusually overcast and dreary for Southern California. None-the-less there were plenty of skaters at the skate park and I managed to get a couple of shots. I used a polarizing filter to cut the light down even more so I could make the skaters blurry, to give them a sense of faster motion.

Blue Sky Mining

Last week I was working on a pilot for a television show and our location was a strip mine. The mine is still working, in fact they have plans to completely decapitate some of the large hills in the area. It’s gorgeous country and kind of sad to think it will all be leveled in a few years. But I wanted to get some shots of the huge machinery that is used for this kind of task, but I got to location a little later than I had hoped and only had time to get this one shot.

A huge earth shredding machine
Blue Sky Mining

A Huge earth shredder rips into the hills and grinds them into sand.

Night Photography in Chicago II

Chicago River Front Walk, winter '09

It used to be a writers town and it’s always been a fighter’s town. For writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes, cat-bandit, baggage thieves, hallway headlockers on the prowl, baby photographers and stylish coneroos, this is the spot that is always most convenient, being centrally located, for settling ancestral grudges. Whether the power is in a .38, a typewriter ribbon or a pair of six-ouncers, the place has grown great on bone-deep grudges: of writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes.

—Nelson Algren
Chicago: City On The Make

On a blue moon New Years eve Night in Chicago I wanted to get some more images of my hometown, so before going to the year end celebrations I wandered around the downtown river front until it got too cold. And at 17 degrees, that was a very short time and made the long exposures seem much longer.

The thing I like most about making images in a city at night are the colors, and in Chicago that generally means a golden straw colored hue juxtaposed with cooler tones in the buildings and sky.

Click on the images to see a lightbox of larger images.

Two Nights In Baton Rouge

I’m told it’s a four-hour drive from Shreveport to Baton Rouge, but my recent run-in with Louisiana Highway Patrol has me setting the cruise control to keep me traveling at a safely under-the-radar ramble through the forests and over the bayou’s of this lovely state, and it actually takes me slightly closer to five hours to get to my destination, which is a lighting rental house where we will load a 40′ trailer with the the tools of our trade.

Baton Rouge is the state capitol of Louisiana, sits along the banks of the Mississippi River, and it is quite apparent that most of the activity here centers around the campus of the Louisiana State University, and, at least this week, that means football. It’s a big game weekend where the LSU Tigers are hosting their mortal enemy, the Florida Gators and the town seems just on the verge of going crazy. Frat houses are being completely wrapped with thick black plastic sheeting either to hold out, or hold in the enthusiastic revelers (I haven’t figured that one out yet), little tent villages are springing up on every available lawn, and there is a total ban on parking anywhere near the campus, so in my spare few minutes of time for exploring, I head toward the city center.

The former state Capitol building in downtown Baton Rouge
The former state Capitol building in downtown Baton Rouge

This beautiful building which resembles a castle, is the former state Capitol building and now functions as a History museum. Directly across the street from it is an old railroad terminal that also serves as a museum, and the Mississippi River.

Mississippi River from Baton Rouge
Mississippi River from Baton Rouge

No Swimming in Baton Rouge
No Swimming in Baton Rouge

University Lake, Baton Rouge, LA
University Lake, Baton Rouge, LA

I had to stop and get one photo of University Lake, which sits on the eastern edge of the campus of LSU before heading back toward Shreveport.

You can barely see the remnants of a double rainbow outside of Lafayette
You can barely see the remnants of a double rainbow outside of Lafayette

For the three days we were in Baton Rouge it was very hot and humid with big billowy cumulus clouds hanging lazily in the sky, but as we crossed over the Mississippi River on our way back to Shreveport, the skies clouded over and we found ourselves in a driving rain with hellbent wind that kept tossing our car around the freeway. This went on for about 45 minutes until we stopped outside Lafayette for gas and the rain stopped and this gorgeous double rainbow appeared.

Shreveport, LA. Part One

Pre-production for the latest feature film I am working on has begun in and around Shreveport, LA, a city built on oil money which seems to be fairly wet, with lush green landscapes and some of the prettiest sunsets I have seen in awhile. Hopefully I will find an interesting point of view of this place over the next 2 months and, through my lens, bring it to you.

Scott "Scooter" Hillman
Scott "Scooter" Hillman, Key Grip and former trapeze artist

A lot of the buildings seem to be crumbling well before their time in this part of the country, as if they get saturated with all the humidity and rain, and then the real storms come through and just tear open the already weakened structures.

The last curtain has fallen on this theater
The last curtain has fallen on this theater
Ken Ballantine, the Best Boy, and his mosquito protection
Ken Ballantine, Lighting Best Boy, and his mosquito protection

And then there are the mosquitos. This Pump Jack is deep in some woods near Oil City, LA and apparently the center of all things Mosquito. In this photo Ken Ballantine, our Best Boy, models the latest in personal Mosquito attire. They are so thick in this wood that they practically create a haze in the air, in fact they are so dense that you cannot eliminate their bites, you can only minimize them.

More Shreveport to come…

Harleys and HDR

This week I took a trip out to the Salton Sea to try and find a place I had been to 10 or 12 years ago, where the sea had encroached on a small town and partially gobbled up several of the buildings. I thought this would be a great place to make some more images and practice my new found HDR techniques.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for the folks who live there) the interesting place I was looking for no longer exists. Some years ago they had built a berm around the town to hold the water back and destroyed all the buildings that had been eaten away by the extremely salty water.

Jakob on the berm at Bombay Beach

That’s the thing about adventures, you have to expect them to be disappointing sometimes. But the bright side is that I got some more pretty cool images, like the one above of my friend from Copenhagen, Jakob, standing atop the berm.

As I learn more about HDR I think my images will get better. I knew enough to look for the high contrast scene like the one above which, using typical photography would have been a blue sky with silhouettes of the berm and Jakob.

” alt=”” border=”0″ />Two Harleys on Rt 78

I have some more images from this trip to work on, but I’ve got to get to work, so more later…

Dominican Republic

 

While shooting a project in the Dominican Republic for Microsoft I spent a little time walking through a barrio just outside of Santo Domingo. At first there weren’t many people around, but an old woman invited me into her home to show me photos of her son who was serving with the U.S. Army.


By the time I had gotten out of the house, word had gotten around and the project Producer and myself had gone from anonymous to a curiosity to celebrity. Soon the streets were buzzing with activity and my camera was drawing a lot of attention from the neighborhood children. At one point an old man waved me into his yard. He really wanted me to see his bible, for some reason.

Later, back in Santo Domingo I came across a few other kids playing in the street. They were all very interested in the camera and really wanted their pictures taken. Soon they swarmed around me like a band of bees. More kids kept coming out from alleyways, huts, seemingly everywhere. Soon I was swimming in a sea of children.

Not sure why the people of the DR are so interested in just having their pictures taken. They were not like people from any other place I had been to: most 3rd world countries, people want you to take their picture, but then they have their hands out, and in America… well, I’m from Hollywood which has it’s own brand of jaded-ness, but most folks here won’t let you take a photo of them before first negotiating the price. Not in the DR. They just simply seemed to be excited about having their pictures taken.