29 December 2007/ cloud

This photo was taken on a windy night in April 2007 at the El Segundo Power Station. A few times prior to this I had tried shooting long exposures of the smoke coming from the smokestacks of the Scattergood Power Station (which is also in El Segundo, CA) around sunset with mixed results: it turns the smoke into an interesting smear, but one that's a little too thin and diaphanous. Here, though, the lights from the power station help to consolidate the cloud into a more discernible figure—but they also kind of make it look less like smoke (actually, it's really just steam) and more like flame, which I'm not that happy about. Anyway, even though I was shooting this from a public street I got stopped by the police, who claimed that ever since 9/11 it's against the law to photograph power plants...which, if true, is just ridiculous.

28 December 2007/ cloud

This photo is from January 2007, and was taken in the morning on my way into work. I think, to date, it's my favorite cloud photo.

28 December 2007/ tree

This photograph was photographed in a strip mall parking lot in North Las Vegas, which is more or less an endless sea of lifeless, cookie-cutter developer sprawl: block after block of mission style singles and duplexes herded into little clusters behind masonry sound barrier walls. You drive down the streets in North Vegas and it's just you in between two large walls—no trees, no front lawns, and hardly even a dog walker to break the monotony. Just you and little bits of trash that have collected in these desolate corridors, trash which swirls in your wake as you hurry to get the hell out of there. However, after spending a few days there I began to feel like there's something oddly interesting—photographically, anyway—about the absolute generic-ness of North Vegas. Los Angeles, of course, is notorious for its sprawl, but it's old sprawl, and has been overwritten and modified over the years by differential inhabitation...little ethnic neighborhoods, etc. North Vegas, on the other hand, is relatively new sprawl...and is uniformly homogenous in a way and on such a scale that I had never really experienced before. Frankly, I wouldn't mind going back there and photographing it some more...

27 December 2007/ tree

More birds...this time sitting in a fake palm tree located in the parking lot of a Denny's in Santa Clarita, CA. Notice how they seem to prefer the antenna mounts over the fake palm fronds...

26 December 2007/ tree

This is one of two fake pine trees located within the gated confines of a self storage facility in Wilmington, CA. Both relay towers are barely visible from the street, so I'm not sure what the logic is in disguising them. Anyway, when I first went to photograph them I noticed a nest of birds nearby, and decided to photograph the tree with the birds in it. But it actually took three different trips to this site to get a decent shot (featuring a little bird sitting on the cap flashing just to the left of the tree). In the meantime I had a number of very interesting conversations with the various homeless guys who sleep in the area, some of whom think the trees are part of a sinister government surveillance program.

25 December 2007/ christmas tree

Merry Christmas. This photo was taken on Sepulveda Blvd. in El Segundo, CA, just a block south of the Ralph's supermarket and looking west toward my old neighborhood.

24 December 2007/ tree

This is the first one of these cell phone relay tower "trees" I photographed, although this is far from the first shot. It's located on the grounds of the Harbor Freeway Metro Station on South Figueroa St., but I first noticed it as it peeks over the edge of the elevated exit ramp from the 105 east to the 110 north. When I initially decided to photograph it I began by attempting to shoot it from below, near the metro station. But after repeated attempts I still didn't have a satisfactory shot, so I gave up on this one for a long time. Months later, however, I decided to shoot it the way I first saw it: from the exit ramp. After a few solo attempts at a drive-by shooting (bad idea) I wised up and recruited a driver, which allowed me to take the photo from the passenger seat. This photo is from April 2007.

24 December 2007/ clouds

Just before sunset at the Scattergood Power Station in El Segundo, CA. This image looks west toward the ocean and was shot from Grand Ave., at the top of the hill before it descends down to Vista Del Mar.

23 December 2007/ clouds

This photo was taken a year ago today in El Segundo, CA in the early morning.

23 December 2007/ two trees

These two trees are located on the grounds of a car wash on W. Manchester Blvd. in Inglewood, CA. The car wash is closed on Sundays, which made it easier for me to get right up under the trees to photograph them. As is the case with a lot of the photos I've taken of artificial trees, this shot pairs the artificial with the real. I've taken this same shot on numerous occasions—with more definition in the sky, with planes flying overhead, with sunlight and shadow—but I think this simple silhouette with the featureless overcast sky is the most successful.

23 December 2007/ tree

This was taken in April 2007 in Wilmington, CA. The tree is located within a self storage facility on PCH, just across from Banning Park. There are actually two of these artificial trees (both palms) on this property, and I spent a while trying to photograph them both in the same shot. Ultimately, though, I liked this composition better, with just one of the artificial trees set in opposition to a real one in the distance.

22 December 2007/ landscape

This was taken on Thanksgiving morning of 2007, just west of Lincoln, NE. I was on my way to South Dakota to go hiking in the Badlands when I saw this line of trees from the interstate. So I got off at the next exit and worked my way back on dirt roads until I found a decent spot from which to photograph them. I like how they kind of look like teeth on the horizon. Anyway, it was pretty overcast that day, but every once in a while there'd be a small break in the clouds...and in this case I waited around for quite a while in the frigid cold until the clouds broke just enough to briefly illuminate the foreground.

22 December 2007/ tree

This was taken in May of 2007, just a few months before I moved away from LA. Although the entire time I lived there I always griped about never being able to see stars in the sky at night because of the intense light pollution, there's nevertheless something nice about the way the light causes the night sky to glow with a color that's hard to describe—kind of brownish pinkish orange. This is especially true whenever there's a marine layer. In any case, I'd been photographing cell phone relay tower "trees" in and around LA for over a year at this point. As far as I can tell in LA there are only the palm and pine varieties, although according to the manufacturer's website there are also elm and cypress versions available. Anyway, this one is in Hawthorne, near El Segundo Blvd., looking north. I liked the relationship between the two different eras of communication technology—wireless and land line—and how the newer, straighter, taller cell phone tree seems to lord over the older, tilting telephone poles. Anyway, I waited for a particularly foggy night, and set the shot up so that the lights from planes landing at LAX would make a horizontal streak across the middle of the image. In the end, though, I didn't like the way the streaks looked in the photo, so I elected to use one without. The exposure times were all around 60 seconds, which resulted in the vivid orange sky.

22 December 2007/ cloud

This was taken just after sunrise in December 2006, near Longview, CA.