Day of the Doll

Last year, after doing some minor world travel, I decided a nice way to follow it up would be to head south of the border to check out some Dia de los Muertos celebratio.  It would make neat cultural photography.  The only thing that went south was the plan itself, as Mexico, at least according to the media, exploded into drug fueled violence, with heads literally rolling.  I’m usually the first to say the media exaggerates things, but in terms of  being proven wrong, this seemed like tempting fate.  I haven’t heard about it this year so much, so maybe it (again, perhaps literally) died down, but truth be told, I completely forgot about my former plan until a couple weeks ago.

Fortunately, it turns out LA has its own Day of the Dead celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.  Conveniently located indeed, and, at $10 a ticket versus expensive travel costs, a bit more economical.

Day of the Accordion Player

After a warm greeting from this cheery fellow, we snaked past graves, fields, memorials, and somewhat conspicuous port-o-potties, greeted by dozens of booths.  Cynicism would come easily to the right type, who might look at the booths offering cultural tchotchkes to tourists, and the fact that the most enthusiastically costumed looked like artsy LA kids, with a degree of high brow snobbery.  They would have missed the point.  Between the range of costumes, from the bizarre to the incredibly elaborate, were weird moments worth the price of admission alone.

Day of the Upset Undead Children

Scenes like this just disturb and confuse me, so I’ll some it up and just say: ‘Children.’  If you click on it for a larger view, you can see drool dribbling down the chin of the girl on the right, the result of a particularly enthusiastic bout of loud crying.  They’re clearly a little young to hate family themed costumes- it looks like they have another five years or so to get to that point- so I’ll go ahead and go with the obvious ‘child leash’ explanation.  At that age I would have hated to be on one myself, though I must confess that now I love the idea, especially on other people’s children.

Diverting a ways from snarky:

Day of the Brilliant Costumes

These two had brilliant costumes, probably the best put together I saw all day.  Alone they would have been excellent, and paired off, they’re absolutely fantastic.  The crisp detail on their faces was really well done, and the way the gent on the right complimented it with a single contact lens was a particularly nice touch.  Also, check out the young lady’s tattoos.

Day of the Killer Tats

Well played.

The event started a bit late in the day, so other than some brief, nice afternoon sunlight, it got dark quickly.  It seemed like a nice time for some silhouette shots.

Day of the... nighttime.

It’s nice to grab moments like these.  I’m more the photographer who asks permission rather than sneak shots, but sometimes you simply can’t resist the opportunity.  Not to say of course that the unexpected can’t happen, even when someone realises you’re taking their picture.  Portraits are all well and good, but after some time I was looking for something a bit more candid.  This woman had taken a seat among the graves to apply her facepaint, and thinking it made a nice little scene, I asked permission to take a few shots.  She gladly accommodated, and while I was shooting, one of her children curiously wandered into the scene.

OK, it isn't day anymore

All in all, not a bad way to spend a Saturday night, and I’d recommend checking it out if you can next year.  There’s also a wealth of musical performances and food which pictures won’t communicate, and so I won’t even bother.  I’ll just finish with one more portrait of that sweet Day of the Dead facepainting.

Calaveras de Azúcar for sale

Calaveras y mariposas

Bottle caps from high grade glass bottled Mexican Coke

There’s more of that posed versus candid again.  I shot these outside of Tere’s on Melrose at this semi-hole-in-the-wall Mexican place called Tere’s.  It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but the food is delicious.  Egg fried, queso fresco stuffed chile relleno burrito with rice, beans, sour cream and guac?  Yes please.  And check out the size of those cokes.  This isn’t the American HFCS containing coke either.  This is the lovely sugar-rich south of the border cousin, the Mexican Coke.  Sure, you can pick them up at Costco in So Cal, but this one is like twice the size!

As for the photos themselves, they were shot in the shade.  Harsh light is rarely photograph friendly, and this goes double for black and white.  You want to get nice tonality and gradations to capture the spectrum of greys between black and white.  This can be done if you find a good shady spot.  You’ll get much softer lighting, and a much more pleasing result to look at.  With a strobe you can try to fill in detail in harsh light by firing a low powered flash, but natural light is such a great thing.

Late afternoon, down on Melrose.  I love the dynamic here.  It’s just a mannequin in the window, but with Cherise chilling below it, it gains sudden life.  They look like a couple of hoodlums too cool for where they are, but holding onto the spot anyway, a pair you don’t want to fuck with, casually looking off in different directions like they own the place.  This is why I like shooting people.  Alone, the mannequin might have been a kind of interesting if rather stiff shot, but get the right person in there and you gain a whole new energy.

That made in U.S.A. sign is pretty sweet too.

I’m finding myself shooting a lot of verticals with the 50mm.  It lends itself so well to portraits that it kind of comes naturally with that lens.  I’ve got to work on including more horizontals in the mix though.

Beguiling boots

The horizontals also enlarge way better on this site.

Diafine, though, is weird.  It’s a two part solution that is ISO insensitive, temperature insensitive, and apparently lasts forever.  You can theoretically develop a roll of 100 speed film and a roll of 1600 speed film in the same tank, and not have to worry about different development times.  This is amazing.

Diafine plus Fuji Acros film is a particularly nice combination.  I’ll have a few more scans soon, but here’s one.

It gets a nice warm tone also that’s usually lacking in digital b&w, unless the shooter consciously adds it in via toning in photoshop.  I’ll be shooting more of this for sure.

I originally wanted Lightbox on this site, but the problem was that damn box-forming animation it starts with before loading the photo, which just annoys me.  This is much, much faster and unobtrusive.  Hope you like it.

An Optimo fedora. Damn nice windowpane overcoat too.

I happened upon a guy here in So Cal who amassed a huge cache of this magnificent milliner’s work over a few years, but then decided he should sell off his collection.  As luck would have it, this was also a guy who wears the same hat size that I do.

I restrained myself and only purchased one (even used, they’re spendy,) a light weight felt in a ‘Morocco Tan’ colour.  Optimo has a different set of colours every year, and rarely repeats any.  The original owner had the hat made with a high crown, but decided later on that he wanted it bashed down lower profile.  I wanted its original high crown  glory, and had Optimo restore it thus.

Ignore the hirsute appendage

The felt is really something.  Soft, supple, and light weight.  Nice ribbon and bow work as well.  And check out this liner:

Yeah.  That’s some good hat action right there.  They’ve got a light weight felt this year called ‘Seafoam‘ that looks mighty nice.  Might have to pick one of those up…

Rooftop shenanigans

We roasted on the way over.  (90 degrees.  Car has no air conditioning.  $1000 to fix.  No thank you sir.)  Once we got there, I found myself surrounded by scantily clad women.  The hottest thing of all though was- you guessed it- the dynamic range I was able to get out of my Nikon.

You can see here that I shot right into the sun, but was still able to get a nice amount of detail in the shadows.  Shooting RAW allows you to pull off shots like this- details in shadows and extremely bright areas can by pulled out in areas usually inaccessible if you’re shooting plain old jpegs.  It takes more processing time, but is worth the extra effort.

That said, I didn’t let digital have all the fun.

Love and peace

Up on the roof

I shot this on the Leica MP rangefinder with a 50mm Summilux ASPH lens, the most brilliantly over-engineered 50mm lens around.  50mm is typically a standard focal length, and is an excellent focal length to learn on.  Henri Cartier-Bresson shot on 50mm almost exclusively.  Keeping all this in mind, I can’t figure out why it’s one of the most glossed over focal lengths around.  Canon, Nikon, Sigma, etc.- none of these companies make a completely solid 50mm 1.4 lens.  Leica’s is great, but it costs an arm and a leg, and I was lucky to find an extremely well priced used one.

For a couple of years, all I had was a Canon AE-1 and 50mm 1.8.  If you’ve got a new SLR/DSLR, I strongly recommend picking up a 50mm equivalent.  If you’re lucky enough to have a full frame camera, a 50mm will do.  More likely than not, you’ve got a crop factor to deal with, in which case a 35mm lens usually does the trick.

By the way, the film I had in the Leica was Fuji Astia slide film.  Incredible stuff.  Not to say the digital didn’t perform admirably.

Nice makeup

Nice hair

I’m not particularly a fan of artificial lighting, so everything was was shot with available light.  At the beginning of the day, the daylight was quite harsh, and shooting indoors with window light or shooting in the shade was in order.  (It was too bloody hot outside anyway.)

In times like these, shots of people waiting around make for comically absurd photojournalism shots.

It's like a Fellini film

The waiting wound up being worth it.  The pay off is the toward the end of the day, when the light got golden and beautiful.

Parasol day dreaming

Posed-

Annnnnd candid-

The only real trick to candid photos is time and familiarity.  Once you’ve stuck around long enough and taken enough photos, people get tired of posing.  I’m not really a fan of ’stolen’ shots, and hate to shoot without people’s permission- it’s far too nerve-wracking to get good shots, and you wind up relying more on luck.  Patience is the only requirement.  This works too when you’re in unfamiliar situations, surrounded by people you don’t know.  If they start to accept that you’re there and just part of the background, you’ll be able to get candid shots.

In any case, I think the young lady here is going to kill me.

Note how she avoids the cheap stuff and goes straight for the Glenlivet. Pretty good for her age.

There you have it.  More posts coming, lots of new photos, a bunch of old ones too.

Abandoned places-a favourite subject of photographers.  You can find dozens of websites devoted solely to finding interesting, desolate places to explore, some in surprising locations.  Even in a large, populated city like LA, you can find plenty of structures with their days of practical use well behind them.

There’s some unease behind them though, as well, and it’s understandable.  Finding an abandoned structure, even in just a superficial sense, is the architectural equivalent of finding a dead body. 

I’d argue that it’s more than just superficial- they’re actually pretty similar in a lot of ways, the difference being scale.  A body leaves behind it a person’s life story, experiences, relationships.  An old building has this, but for potentially hundreds of people.  If it’s an abandoned house, you’re left wondering about the families that have lived in it over the years, the warm memories, the fights, whether or not someone at some point left the home and sold it to some other family.  An abandoned gas station holds memories of employees- you wonder if they’re still around, what they thought about their work, the thousands of customers who stopped there, maybe only once, where they were coming from and where they went, and where they might be now.

These abandoned places are almost like society’s gravestones, marking memories of past relationships and interconnectedness between all of us.  It’s no wonder photographers are fascinated by them.

Onto a completely practical note now- I’ve set up a flickr account, which you can view here:  http://flickr.com/photos/lexybeast

What am I going to put there?  Anything that I feel, for whatever reason, doesn’t really fit here.  Hopefully you’ll enjoy.   I set it up because I also particularly like the community that flickr not only provides but strongly pushes for, so don’t hesitate to add me on there if you’d like.

Oh, and all these shots were good old fashioned film, by the way.  Ilford SFX, to be exact.  I’ll be posting a lot more film work in the coming days.