Sunday Color Picture Book
Month: June 2013
It’s Just a Smile Turned Upside Down
Red and Green
Sunset Strip Scenes
An otherwise fantastic day in Los Angeles…
Two weeks ago today we started out down Pico Blvd., oblivious, enjoying our afternoon taking pictures. President Obama was in town and in the Santa Monica area so all the helicopters made perfect sense. So did the police barricades far down Pico near Santa Monica College. People milled about as if the President were likely to come right past them.
Well, that’s what we thought anyway. Had I known that there was a shooting rampage near the campus resulting in multiple fatalities, a sadly common occurrence in the United States at this particular time, I would have come away with an entirely different set of images, I think. But incredibly, even after seeing up close the disruption caused by the actions of a madman, we went about our day continuing to believe that, once again, the president had caused a major interruption to the already crowded Westside.
It was only much later in the afternoon that we found out what had really happened. So here are some random shots from that afternoon. Some capture the tense scenes around SMC, some reflect the degree to which we were completely unaware that this was unlike every other day in LA.
As so often is the case, in retrospect things look much different.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: ‘There Are No Maybes’
Great New York Times feature on HCB. With audio.
In 1971, Sheila Turner-Seed interviewed Henri Cartier-Bresson in his Paris studio for a film-strip series on photographers that she produced, with Cornell Capa, for Scholastic. After her death in 1979 at the age of 42, that interview, along with others she had conducted, sat like a time capsule in the archives of the International Center of Photography in New York.
Why the 50-millimeter lens?
A.It corresponds to a certain vision and at the same time has enough depth of focus, a thing you don’t have in longer lenses. I worked with a 90. It cuts much of the foreground if you take a landscape, but if people are running at you, there is no depth of focus. The 35 is splendid when needed, but…
Read the rest HERE.
Precious Cargo
A Look Back: The Nikon Coolpix 950
I actually bought, if not the first, then one of the first digicams marketed to the masses, the Casio Something or Other. Thanks to a liberal return policy at the now long gone Good Guys, that camera, which I believe set me back somewhere in the neighborhood of $800, was quickly taken off the charge card. I didn’t even think of buying another digital camera until about five years later. There was a very cool-looking camera from, I believe, either Canon or Olympus. But then there was the camera that won the highest ratings from all the camera reviewers. The Nikon. And I’d always been a Nikon guy.
But this camera was a weird looking thing, with a twisting body type, and it had a decidedly uncool name. Coolpix 950. But I went with the consensus opinion anyway and honestly never looked back. Until now. 😉 In retrospect, it WAS a cool camera. So cool the idea of shooting a ‘Coolpix’ camera again, this time the allegedly fantastic Coolpix A, is an intriguing thought. It would be like coming home for me actually. Stay tuned. As an aside, I love that this blog gives me the opportunity to traipse through my entire photo history, dragging any visitors here along with me. So stay tuned for more of that, too.
Most if not all of these images would have been taken prior to 2004.
Living Color
”Oh dad, could you please stop bragging about your affair with Liberace?”
Ha ha ha! That’s from David Letterman’s writers, by the way. Runner up was, “Hey Dad, thanks for teaching me to smoke.”
Just my way of saying, Happy Father’s Day!!!
Hip, but not tragically so…
Purple Monday
Flowers for Shirley
Learned today of the passing, not unexpected, of such a beautiful woman from my home town. She was way beyond my biggest grade school crush. She was a wife, mom, and young grandmother of an equally beautiful family. Gone way too soon. She was the consensus most beautiful girl in a town of beautiful women. I said that when I realized what was sitting behind me in the 6th grade it was like Columbus discovering America. Sad day for many people.
LACMA, Wilshire Blvd., March 2005
Sisters
Another old Nikon street shot.
Waiting for their shot…
50'Lux 