The Gurly Life

Red flowers

I went to Griffith Park on Sunday to sun myself, in a desperate attempt to hang on to my tan from Hawaii. Between Los Feliz Boulevard and the park, Vermont Avenue is split and there's a wide grassy area in the middle with trees. Currently some of the trees have almost no leaves but a plethora of bright red flowers. Visually they're quite striking. I attempted to capture some of the interesting visuals. I didn't have much time so I probably did not exhaust the possibilities, but here you go.

I dig this photo

And I don't care if I'm the only one.

A castle in the sky

Today I went to court for a hearing that never was. Definitely worthwhile, I had lunch with a former professor (a favorite professor, the one who is almost single-handedly responsible for my career in public entity lawyering), who is now a judge. And I saw something that I needed to photograph. It took about 20 minutes to get the shot I wanted, but here it is. I just love it.

I'm *this* close to mastery

I have been reading a very interesting book, Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Won't Stop Talking. I was reminded that mastery, in any field, takes about 10,000 hours of focused practice. Give or take. If I did nothing but take and edit photos 24/7, it would take 416.66 days to do 10,000. This doesn't sound like too much time, but if I break it down realistically, it's kinda a lot of time. If I even averaged 4 hours a week (and that's generous, I don't get to this every week), it would take 2,500 weeks. That's roughly 48 years. HAHAHAHAHA! OHMYGOD that's funny. Feel free to check my math, by the way, I'm usually wrong.

I've been taking photographs for at least a couple of decades, with varying degrees of commitment, but did not truly get intentional about it until about 3 or 4 years ago. So, discounting much of the time before the last 3 years, I would say I have about 9,500 hours till I reach the mastery level, only about 45 and a half years. Woo hoo, I can almost taste it! Hahahahaha!

In other words, practice practice practice. For the next 100 years, more like. Good thing I have a long life expectancy.

Meanwhile, here are a few downtown LA/Chinatown photos. You can see the whole Flickr set here (set is only 15 pics).

Incidentally, I did the same calculation for lawyering. If I calculate 40 hour weeks, 50 weeks a year, it only takes 5 years to master the law. Which, frankly, is nonsense, it takes about 3 or 4 times that long. I hope photography is not the same, otherwise I will need a life expectancy of 300 years or so.

Sunset from Haleakala

Here's the slideshow. We were here.

 

 

Hana Highway, Part Deux

Last time I drove the Hana Highway, I took one million pics and posted them all. That means I have already taken most of the photographs that I took when I did it again. However, I did try to get slighly different kind of shots than last time, too, and these are the ones I'm showing you. Trust me, there are 6,000 (I exaggerate a little) other pictures of jungle-like vegetation, which I will spare you. There are also lots of goofy pics with my friends Willow and Adam, and those will be forthcoming, too. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy these. You can see them as a slideshow by going to this link. There are only 17 photos, so I recommend it.

 

Exploring the city on a bike without getting run over

Have you ever heard of this cool thing called CicLAvia? It just happened, on Sunday, April 15. Not the first one, apparently. They closed off 10 miles of city streets from 10am to 3pm, and only bikers and pedestrains and skaters could use them. It was the most fun I've had in a very long time. I rode mostly on my own, surrounded by several thousands of my closest friends. I of course had my camera, and stopped a bunch of times to take pictures. Exploring LA city streets without all those damn cars is really something else. I was on my bike for almost 4 hours. It's gonna hurt in the morning -- no, it's hurting now, and it's gonna hurt bad in the morning. Totally worth it.

Bikers milling about close to 10am, ready to take the roads. At 10 on the dot, shouts and cheering started us off. I started at the Bicycle District Hub, at Heliotrope and Melrose. It is less than 2 miles south of where I live, and down the hill. So, I got on my bike and rolled on down there.

Riding through a residential neighborhood. Look, no cars! I didn't even know this street was there.

Around a corner, and there's downtown within sight. Did not take long at all, especially since it's downhill almost the entire way from my place to downtown.

The Park Plaza Hotel. Did you know this was here? I didn't! They were shooting something. In retrospect, I should have asked them to let me wonder around for a few minutes.

The pond in the background is MacArthur Park.

View of the 110 freeway from the 7th Street bridge.

Coming to downtown off the 7th Street bridge.

An ironic statue at one of the fancy corporate buildings downtown. The security guards were staring slackjawed at all the bikers, they just ignored me. Usually I get shooed off a property if I'm taking pictures.

Downtown buildings.

Bikers in downtown LA.

A building downtown. I love the fire escapes on these older buildings.

I rode all the way east past Alameda, and through a neighborhood that was all food stalls and pinata shops. Loud music blared, and every food imaginable cooked on outdoor barbeques and cooking surfaces of all kinds.

And then, on Central Avenue, the Coca Cola bottling plant. For real.

Which looks like a ship.

This is a hand-made bicycle. It says "I'm a bad-ass, but I care about the environment." Lots of shiny skulls.

This is bike polo. Polo, on bikes. Yup. What will they think of next?

Railroad tracks and the LA river from one of the bridges.

Since the way back was shaping up to be one long uphill ride, and since I needed to get back to go swimsuit shopping (yeah, I know!), I decided to take the subway back. I had run into a couple of people from my meetup group, and one of them very gallantly escorted me safely back to Union Station.

"I'm a dude! Get off me, you perv!"

On Saturday I had lunch plans with Dee.

This is Dee with the jindo she is fostering, Dori. Dori is a boy, and while the name may sound like a girl's name, it's actually a Korean name so it all makes sense.

As I was running about an hour early (when does that ever happen on a weekend?), I grabbed my camera and played around. I went to the beach, but it was about 11 am so the light could not have been flatter.

This is either interesting or utter shit, I can't really tell. I'm leaning towards utter shit, but maybe I'm wrong. It's taken through the orange slats at the Santa Monica Mall parking lot. I could spare you my utter shit, and only post the good ones, but what fun would that be?

Incidentally, the SM Mall parking lot is total genius-slash-big brother. This is what they have on every floor if you can't remember where you parked your car. I took a picture, because if I had told you, you wouldn't have believed me. Of course, I don't remember my car's license plate, so I'm not sure that this would be helpful. Eh hem. I should have tried looking for "Pixie the Prius." Of course, I might be blogging from a mental asylum as a result, but what a blog post, right?

The other cool thing is that they have red/green lights along the ceilings indicating whether each space is available or not. In case you're wondering, red is for not available, green is for available - once you get the hang of it, it's easy. If you're color-blind, I guess you're SOL. Or you do it the old fashioned way and actually look at the spaces as you drive by them to find the available ones.

Someone was flying a spectacular kite on the beach. Unfortunately I wasn't able to capture its dragon face, but the wings were really amazing:

I was trying to do something that I had too much light for: I wanted to use a slow shutter speed to capture motion. At first, I tried standing still, and letting the moving subject go by. Blech. It's harder than it looks to get just the right amount of blur. Also, I didn't have my tripod, or the filter to reduce light coming through the lens, so...

Next, I tried a slow shutter speed while following the subject. The aim is to get a (more or less) sharp subject and a blurred background. The idea was good, if unoriginal, but again too much light and no tripod. Here's the best I was able to do, which is hardly worth writing about (and yet, here we are!):

The lesson here is, practice practice practice. Also, I think it would have worked better if I'd been photographing moving subjects directly in front of me.

While crossing the bridge over Pacific Coast Highway, I took this one:

After lunch, Dee, Dori and I went to a cute little park off Wilshire Boulevard, and sat by the pond to watch the ducks.

Well.

You have never seen such duck drama. First of all, there were maybe three girl ducks and about a dozen boy ducks. Good odds for the girls, but you know that spells trouble. There was a lot of chasing around, flapping of wings, splashing of water, generally a great commotion. All was revealed when we noticed that one of the boy ducks was trying to get it on with other boy ducks. Not that there's anything wrong with that, some of my best friends are boy ducks who like to get it on with other boy ducks; the problem here was that the other boy ducks were having none of it and would squawk with dismay when Mr. Horny Pants would hop on their backs. Finally, another boy duck, probably the pond principal, had to intervene to stop the nonsense. I did not capture the action as I was too disturbed by the duck-on-duck violence. No means no, dude.

And so ends episode 235 of On Golden Pond. Please join us next time when Mr. Horny Pants is revealed to actually be his own evil twin.

More experiments

The truth is that if I have my camera with me, I will take photos. And experiment. I love digital because you can experiment till the cows come home, and you can just delete everything if you don't like it. None of these are great, but they were fun to photograph and edit, so here they are!

I like this one because you can see how soft Cricket actually is.

 

Procrastination

Is the best friend of creativity. Seriously.

Today, I was supposed to spend much of the day doing traffic school. Naturally, I've been procrastinating. Earlier today I went to get my hair cut and my friend Ian was there, too, so we went to lunch at Farmer's Market. Then I came home, and decided I had to go for a walk on this fine windy day, and take pictures. Which of course I then had to edit. And post. So, here they are.

And now, I have no choice but to return to traffic school. Although perhaps I need to make myself some tea, first...