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.

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.