photography

LA’s Noir Legend Lives Again at Park Plaza Hotel

L1046201-EditFrom The Park Plaza’s Wikipedia page:

Though the neighborhood has gone through a period of urban decay and now urban renewal, the building, replete with angels at every corner, has lost none of its ethereal beauty and elan, making it truly one of the classic examples of Claude Beelman’s architecture left standing in the modern world. The building is now vacant, mainly used as a rental for movie shoots and special events, however, the City of Los Angeles thought the architecture significantly important enough to warrant a City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department Historic-Cultural Monument No. 267, as far back as the early 1980s. This is significant in that many other Wilshire Boulevard area landmarks fell prey to the wrecking ball during that time period, such as the notable Brown Derby. Luckily, despite the demolition of important landmarks all around it, the grand entrance and ballroom of the Elk’s No. 99 / Park Plaza building still bears its old “jazz age” grandeur, much to the relief of Los Angeles architectural aficionados. The elaborate interior murals and decorative paintings were designed and executed by Anthony Heinsbergen and Co, noted painter of many Los Angeles cultural landmarks. The central design of the lobby ceiling is based on the Villa Madama, a Renaissance era project by Raphael and Giulio Romano.

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City People

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No great shakes here. More like a feeling. All these images were taken this past Saturday and Sunday. Seems to me that LA has shed the tourists and the holiday spirit and settled into itself once again. It’s a colder place than it was a month ago. Anyway, there’s a lot of shots. I do try to give anyone who visits here their money’s worth.

I left the last image, the stunning blonde sitting at a distance in the cafe , so that the image can be clicked on and examined at a larger resolution. It’s not a great or meaningful photograph. I posted it because I find it amazing sometimes what unlikely things you can do with a Leica pressed flat against your face. Thanks for looking!

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Vivian Maier exhibition reveals magic of a photographic master unknown in her lifetime

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Vivian Dorothea Maier was an American street photographer, who was born in New York City and spent much of her childhood in France. After returning to the United States, she worked for approximately forty years as a nanny in Chicago, Illinois.

During those years, she took more than 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes in Chicago, although she traveled and photographed worldwide.

Two years before she died in 2009 at age 83, the eccentric and brilliant amateur photographer forfeited ownership of the contents of the storage lockers in which she had kept truckloads of negatives, prints and other materials.

The contents were quickly auctioned for a pittance to several collectors and “resellers” who found they had made the discovery of a lifetime.

The contents of Maier’s collection included more than 100,000 negatives that charted her hitherto-private career as a superb street photographer who focused mainly on vignettes of New York and Chicago.

via Vivian Maier exhibition at the Cleveland Print Room reveals the magic of a photographic master unknown in her lifetime | cleveland.com.

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New York Times: Classic Lensman, Using Full Palette

Perhaps the greatest revelation provided by “Capa in Color” is not that Robert Capa, best known as a war photographer, shot in color film. It is that he shot in color frequently, honing his technical facility and trying to get the work published in magazines that began printing color photographs in the late 1930s.

via ‘Capa in Color’ at International Center of Photography – NYTimes.com.

Ventura Girl

venturagirl-Edit-2-EditOne from the very old pre-Leica days.

Christmas Light

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Santa Monica Claus

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Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pa pum pum
To lay before the King, pa rum pa pum pum,
Rum pa pum pum, rum pa pum pum
So to honor Him, pa rum pa pum pum
When we come

Little baby, pa rum pa pum pum
I am a poor boy too, pa rum pa pum pum
I have no gift to bring, pa rum pa pum pum
That’s fit to give our King, pa rum pa pum pum,
Rum pa pum pum, rum pa pum pum

The ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pa pum pum
I played my drum for Him, pa rum pa pum pum
I played my best for Him, pa rum pa pum pum,
Rum pa pum pum, rum pa pum pum
Then He smiled at me, pa rum pa pum pum

Plan B 2.0

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I had a plan for this blog. As I accumulated blog-worthy shots I would dole them out one at a time, one a day, each with a pithy title. This wasn’t my original plan for 50lux, however. It was more like Plan B. The original plan? Well. That’s a longer story.

There’s a big problem with Plan B. It creates a slow and boring website. And it’s tedious beyond belief for me.

But the idea is that there are 365 days in the year… that requires at least 365 blog-worthy photographs every year… I’m not going to be out shooting every day or maybe even every week… so there’s always been the concern that one day I’m going to run out of pictures.

Well, as much as that’s likely to happen and it is, I’ve decided to jettison that kind of thinking and just do what the hell I want. So the new plan, Plan B 2.0 you could call it, is to post a lot more pictures. Bunches of pictures.

Not all of these pictures represent the best of my efforts and successes. They are not all great pictures. They might not all tell much of a story.

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But most of them should.

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Not all of the images that I post will reflect the endless tireless patience (which I don’t have) for post processing. There will be noise! 😉 And underexposures! (especially if they help to capture the mood or level of light of the actual scene.)

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They certainly will not be carefully composed. I can be a pathological composer. But for the sake of capturing something as dynamic and alive as the city of Los Angeles… I’ll sacrifice some points in the street photographers’ world rankings to bring back images that do the complicated things that I want my images to do.

If the moment is about an expression that is revealing or a relationship that is interesting and the image I snap captures that moment… then I won’t hold back showing that image here on the blog simply because it is not also a perfect and carefully thought out alignment of compositional elements.

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Anyway. I’ll be working my way backwards from the latest to the earliest from this year. When I run out, I’ll stall with some pithy discussion or reblog until I can go out and grab some more images.

Next year, I sincerely hope to start using the blog in some of the ways I imagined using it when I started it. But that’s a story for another day. Until then… as they used to say in the lumberjack trade (in cartoons) look out below!

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What We’re Talking About When We Talk About Light

Yet another re-blog. This one is different because… it’s the first time it’s ever been re-blogged! How unique that makes it among my re-blogged articles. 😉

donald barnat's avatar50'Lux

Apologies to Raymond Carver. Reposted from the early days of 50lux.com

I think of the best stuff when I’m half asleep. It’s called hypnagogia and I’ve got a bad case of it. I’m not alone, apparently, as a New York Times article pointed out late last year and as Wikipedia establishes as encyclopedic fact.

Many other artists, writers, scientists and inventors — including Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Walter Scott, Salvador Dalí, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton — have credited hypnagogia and related states with enhancing their creativity.

I’m intending to capture some of these fantastic creative thought processes that trot through my mind when I’m half asleep for the purpose of bringing them back alive and showing them to the world here on 50lux.com. It won’t be easy. Not many things are when you’re half asleep. Nature of the beast. More on all this later. But let’s start off…

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Proof of Heaven

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Okay, the thing is, it’s here on Earth and it’s just for some lucky guy down in Laguna Niguel, Orange County, CA. But there it is. And we can all experience heaven vicariously through him, right?

Actually, I’m pretty much in heaven shooting this Leica 90mm Elmarit 2.8. Oh yes I am. This image above is actually a crop of the one below.

Now I could have cropped to the blonde in the thong. Yes, she is blonde and she is wearing a thong. Then many of you would probably be in heaven for a moment or two. But you’d hate yourselves later and I wouldn’t want that. 😉

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La Reina Blanca

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Body Language

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Hollywood Jewels: Part 2

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Fast glass in fading light…

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Upstairs Renovations

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Not our upstairs, mind you. We don’t have an upstairs. We have Leica GEAR! 😉 Our friends are very proud of all the work they’ve done. Their home is about a half mile from the Pacific Ocean, which you can see from their back porch and even better from their roof. So that light is the real deal. These were taken in a rush as we were given a quick tour on the 4th of July. I’d like to have a couple of hours down there shooting the great detail work with all that light and the great Leica and Zeiss glass I’m lucky enough to own. Instead of an upstairs. 😉

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Henri Cartier-Bresson: ‘There Are No Maybes’

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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.

The Three Graces

triplets at night_barnat1600I took this shot about five years ago and have never really shown it to anyone. I think the reason for that is that I never thought I could adequately explain how amazing it is to me. I guess I’ve felt it needed explaining and I guess I’m finally in the mood now to try.

No part of the West LA area is really that bad. But this is nearly as gritty a corner on the Westside as there is. It’s directly underneath the intersection of the 405 and 10 freeways, which is to say, the junction of the two busiest roadways in the United States of America. There are homeless people camped out under the overpasses and exit ramps. It was fairly late in the evening. The feel there at that hour is probably worse than the reality. Or vice versa. Who really knows?

I travel by that way innumerable times a year. At any hour, but especially late in the evening, the very LAST thing you would expect to find there is three truly lovely sisters, possibly triplets, on bicycles, cooling their jets waiting for the light to change. Trust me, you just don’t see this in LA at that hour. In most of Los Angeles, they kind of roll up the sidewalks. That’s a common complaint of people from New York and elsewhere who have moved to LA from cities with a more active night life.

I’m a man. The car was being driven by my lady of 38 years. We both were like, DID YOU SEE THAT? And then she asks, Did you GET it? I don’t know how I got it. The green light was with us and we never even slowed down going through the intersection. I probably was pre-focused to some degree and the amazing Nikon D3 sang the song. I put the camera to my face, framed the ladies and slammed down the shutter release. It just happened. It’s one of those moments that makes me so happy that I had a camera, not to create some work of art or anything like that, but just to capture the natural beauty I witnessed there at the grimy and otherwise unsightly corner of Sawtelle and Pico Blvds that night.

Alone, a younger man, I would have probably slammed on the brakes and went down the line asking for their hands in marriage. Because these sisters are not afraid of the dark or probably anything else. I thought maybe there was someone filming them, like a reality show or something. Truly gutsy young ladies. And reason #90454 I’m glad I never had children.

iPhoning it in… AGAIN!

Okay, I officially don’t like the reblogging button here on WordPress. So I’m rePOSTING this post from last summer.

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Throwing a bunch of pics up that have been given the Instagram process. Even though none of them were taken with my iPhone.

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NY Times Article on Garry Winogrand

Metropolitan Opera, 1951

“Mr. Winogrand had no patience for the phony sympathies he thought connected too many photographers to their subjects. In the exhibition catalog, Mr. Rubinfien writes that the most successful pictures, in Mr. Winogrand’s mind, were the ones “that told you that the world was a jumble of fragments, that the truth was more complex than any account could be.”

Garry Winogrand

Negative Space

That’s really quite positive if you catch my drift.