An Architect's Work is a Photographer's Pleasure

It's no wonder Frank Gehry's architecture is photographed as often as it is: it's as if he designed, specified materials, and built with photographers in mind. Planes of curving glass or metal, ascetically clean and unadorned, reflect the world and sky that surround his buildings. Whether glowing or burning, radiating soft hues or blindingly pearlescent grey tones, his work is our pleasure.

Certainly one of the most oft-photographed Gehry creations has to be the Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Like a beached futuristic Ark of alien design, it sits upon a hill, positioned between the older, New Formalism style architecture of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the imposing high rises of Bunker Hill. I have enjoyed shooting there on several occasions with both infrared and visible light cameras. On my latest trip to L.A. we arrived an hour or so before sunset ?? an ideal time ?? and were rewarded with smoky clouds as backdrop. The soft billows and hard-edged planes both caught and threw back the changing light as the sun dropped lower.

As usual, selecting a few representative images from the many is a challenge: a slight change in angle or in time of capture yields a whole new interpretation. Infuriatingly, the management of the Concert Hall permit no tripod usage on the block the building sits upon. (If you want to use 3-legged support, you must cross to the other side of one of the streets.) This is fine for relatively shallow depth of field images, but the building demands a least a few sweeping wide-angle, extreme DOF photographs. Even without a tripod, with a combination of my Pentax camera's built-in shake resistance, timed breathing, and the creative use of the building itself for support, I was able to capture the f/22, near-to-infinity drama shots I was looking for.

Kelso Dunes: A Drive By

If anyone knows about the Kelso Dunes — and I’ll wager not many do — then they know that one just doesn’t happen to “drive-by” these 650 foot tall sand dunes. Instead, you must plan to go there, even if for only a half hour, as I did this week.

The plan was to drive home (Salt Lake City) from my step-mother’s house in Southern California via the Mojave National Preserve rather than the shorter but tedious I-10 to I-15 interstate route.  Why? Because I wanted to see — and briefly photograph — the Kelso Dunes again. First, and last, there some 29 years ago, I had memories of climbing to the top of dunes for a sunset with my then girlfriend. We had camped in the nearby Providence Mountains and the austere, dry quiet of the Mojave had awed both of us. This was before the Preserve was established and the State of California created the Providence Mountains State Recreation Area (which, along with another 60+ state parks has been embarrassingly closed due to ‘deficit-reduction’ since 2008) and so toodling around in the desert carried more risk then then it does now. The roads were much rougher and pavement was much sparser.

Now, heading north into the heart of the Mojave Desert on the Kelbaker Road in my father’s VW Passat and listening to his old Doobie Brothers and Blood, Sweat & Tears cassettes (thinking of you dad), the experience and goal were of a different nature. Rather than camp and hike, I planned to drive and shoot. Climbing past the aptly named Granite Mountains and descending the long straight grade after the pass, there lay the long line of amber-ish colored dunes to the west and the short 3 mile long graded dirt road to the trailhead.

Of course many a visitor to National Parks execute true drive-bys. You’ve seen them, yes? They drive-up, stop the vehicle, perhaps turn-off the engine (but, probably not), and hold their point-and-shoot or smart phone at arm’s length, snap the digital shutter, climb back in the vehicle and disappear, heading to the next scenic spot where they are supposed to take a picture. I witnessed the ultimate drive-by last year when at the end of Chicken Corners Road in the Greater Canyonlands area — a partially 4WD road that takes 3-4 hours to drive one-way — a woman in the passenger side of a rented open-air jeep, said “awesome, just awesome” as she snapped a couple of frames, whilst the jeep turned around, and headed home again. The jeep didn’t stop and she didn’t get out. Is that not strange behavior of homo urbis?

I don’t really do true drive-bys, so grabbing my Pentax K-5 and my infrared modified Pentax K10, I started trudging towards the main dune in the 80 degree heat. No plan really other than to find a spot closer and perhaps nicer to shoot a few frames. After 15-20 minutes I found a few sand ripples and clumps of greenery and though it was late morning and the sun was harsh, I documented my desert side trip on the long journey home. The numerous creosote bushes were sporting small yellow flowers but the persistent breeze played havoc with any attempt to photograph them, so I didn’t. The four shots here, though perhaps borderline repetitive, will hopefully give one a feel for the unique nature of these plant-stabilized dunes. Reportedly the oldest dunes (~25,000 years) in North America, and the third highest (after the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado and the Eureka Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park), the Kelso Dunes really deserve more than a drive-by.

Next time.

Union Station, at a Glance

I admit that I have a somewhat childish fascination with trains. I never built models of them as a kid, preferring WWII airplanes. And though I did have a train set that my dad mounted on an accurately painted large piece of plywood (lakes and greenery and a bridge!), I don't particularly have any wistful memories of playing with the trains. So I came rather late to my appreciation of things locomotive.

Trains and train stations are part and parcel, and though many of the latter can be quite grim and grubby, others are exceptional design expressions of architects and their times. Whether grand or quaint, many train stations are prime territory for photographers.

One of the things I like about shooting established architecture is that I explore the structure with my cameras and then often I'll explore again via my computer and Wikipedia, or other reference sites.

Case in point: I was in Los Angeles on a photo trip this past February and spent an hour photographing the Union Station. Completed in 1939, it is a blend of three architectural styles (according to Wikipedia): Dutch Colonial Revival, Mission Revival, and Streamline Moderne. Of course I looked these styles up and Mission Revival seems the obvious parent with perhaps a touch of the Moderne.

Regardless of its pedigree, it is a compelling structure with many interesting features. This starts with its distinctive tower and art-deco inspired building entrance. Once in the building you are confronted with a long foyer and to the left the old blocked-off-to-the-public Main Ticketing Concourse. This is now used for scheduled photo sessions like the couple shoot I saw taking place. I would have loved to wander in this spacious room but contented myself with a few wide-angle shots.

The main waiting room is ahead and though it is now occupied by the ball cap crowd, you can almost imagine the fedoras and suits of the '40's and '50's. At the end of the the train access passageway is a large room with a huge crystal-like skylight overhead (really, the word skylight does not do it justice) . This appeared to be a connector to a bus station and despite the fact that bus stations are generally in a different (and lower) league than train stations, this room had fascinating touches and wonderful light.  

Too quick, my walking tour was over. The sunset was approaching and Frank Gehry's Concert Hall was just a few blocks away. Its shimmering mirror-like panels beckoned.

Return to Eureka Dunes

It was one month shy of a quarter century since I had last been here. Easter week in 1987 we – my wife, our 7-year old daughter, and our 2-year old golden retriever – pulled into the lee of the 700+ foot tall Eureka Sand Dunes in our 1972 International Scout. The only other person there was some bozo riding a 3-wheeler on the lower dunes, fortunately in the distance. There was no campground, certainly no outhouse, and in fact Death Valley was still a Monument and its boundaries did not yet extend to this lonely and remote valley. Against a crystal blue sky we climbed the highest dune and later that night relished a warm evening beneath a canopy of limitless stars.

Fast forward 299 months…the Scout is long gone, Whiskey – our first golden retriever – lived a long life but is also no longer with us, our daughter is grown up, my wife was at home, and me and my friend / photography-partner finally arrived after a 10+ hour drive at the primitive Eureka Valley campground on this cold, cloudy March afternoon. Death Valley National Park extended its borders a decade-and-a-half-ago to include this valley, as well as Saline and Panamint Valleys. Other than fourteen or so widely scattered campsites, and the one lone sentinel of an outhouse, it was hard to see any difference in what I remembered from 25 years ago. Oh yes, no bozos are permitted to ride their toys on the dunes…progress.

It was chilly but after selecting a site and setting up camp, we ventured into the lower march of dunes to photograph a sandy sunset. Little time remained before the sun dipped below the horizon, and my goal was to hike high on a dune ridge to a) be beyond any traces and tracks of human footprints – always a challenge in the dune environment – and b) be positioned appropriately to capture the waning light on the dunes.

It didn’t take me long to clamber high enough to reach a stretch of virgin sand, long with sinuous cascades of ripples. The clouds played havoc with the light – a muted softbox effect punctured by occasional bright bursts of the sun and its light – and ultimately yielded little in the way of dramatic and classic sunset colors. Nonetheless, there were brief windows when things worked and the elements came together to create interesting images: a knife-ridge here lit by golden light on one side, shadowy dusk descending on the other; a thin, struggling bush there acting as an organic counter-point to the mountains of silky silica. I concentrated on those moments and subjects, attempting to distill the essence of cool spring dusk turning into the winter of a cold, starry night; trying to do justice to the power, beauty, and serenity of the desert environment.   

Lines, Angles, Patterns, Light and Shadow...at the Getty Center

Working with light is the easy truism of what photographers do: no photons, no image burned on sensor, plate or film. But really it is what the light reveals — and in some cases does not reveal — that provides us the canvas to paint upon. In the natural as well as the built world I am continually searching for the lines, angles and patterns that light and shadow create. A wonderful place to explore this is The Getty Center, above Los Angeles.

On a recent photography assignment in the L.A. area I had the luxury of a day off and I spent it at the Getty. The crowds were minimal and the weather promised an early Spring. The view stretched to the coast unhindered by the usual horizontal brown streaks, and a deep blue sky with voluminous billowy clouds floated overhead. The shadows were strong without the light being overly harsh. It seemed the perfect set of conditions to forego my visible light cameras and walk instead in the world of infrared photography.

Shooting with my infrared-converted Pentax K100 (830nm) and Pentax K10 (780nm) DSLRs at focal lengths ranging from 14mm to 70mm I was able to capture striking compositions. The bright-white clouds contrasted with the deep black sky and both provided the perfect backdrop for the play of light and shadow in the near distance. The Getty Center, designed by architect Richard Meier, features his trademark white architecture, in this case white panels overlaid on curving, even sensuous framework. This is juxtapositioned with arrow-straight beams and walkways. Superimposed on all are multiple impressions of grids: in the walls, the windows, the stairwells, and railings. Occasional walls and foundations of rough-hewn, pale ochre stone act as a marked and organic contrast to the mathematical equation of the main metal and concrete structures.

The fun begins immediately after stepping off of the tram in the Arrival Plaza (you must take a small ‘people-mover’ from the lower parking lot to the Getty complex, per se). Most people quickly shoot their first of many tourist photos here standing in the front of the wide ascending steps leading to the Museum Entrance Hall. This building yields the classic undulating pose featured in brochures, articles, and so many folks’ photographs...including my own. But having shot it from ground level a few years back, I wanted a different view. That’s what led me to climb the steps leading to the upper floor of the oft-ignored restaurant building. This put me at a level to shoot the curves of the main building straight-on, but more importantly gave me lots of lines, curves, patterns, light and shadows to play with as I worked my way around the structure.

From there my wanderings took me to the Research Institute Exhibition Gallery, the gardens (too crowded), the West Pavilion and back to the Museum Hall. When my day at the Getty was finished I had not even ventured into the Main Plaza, much less the North, South and East Pavilion buildings. No worries: something left for my return visit. Exploring the lines, angles, patterns, light and shadow of architecture is not only a joy but can yield rich and compelling images, especially if you take the time to really work it.

Exploring The Gamble House

Coming late to architecture, I had never heard of the Gamble House. But recently I was in the LA area for a quick architectural tour and my daughter suggested we check out this American Craftsman Style house of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Built in 1908 for David Gamble (of Proctor & Gamble fame) the house is outstanding from many perspectives. The architects – Greene & Greene – used an array of over 20 different woods. All of the furniture and finishings, including cabinets, picture frames and even a piano, were created in their millwork shop from original designs. Additionally, all of the lamps and wall sconces were individually designed. Throughout the entire house can be found an interesting interweaving of Japanese design and aesthetics with an American sense of spaciousness and the possible.

The only way to view the interior is via an hour long guided tour. It is worth it. The docent that led us was very well-versed in not only the minutiae of the Gamble family and their house, but he also knew much about the architect brothers. He also shared interesting details about life in the early 20^th century. For instance, there was a fear in the early days of electricity that direct exposure to light bulbs would be harmful. That is why all of the light bulbs are pointing upwards or otherwise shielded from direct view. Those deadly photons!

The house is essentially a working museum. The last Gamble lived there until 1966 and then the building and grounds were donated to the city of Pasadena. Through a special arrangement with USC, two senior architecture students live and study there every year. With little change, things are the way they were a 100 years ago.

From a photographic perspective, the interior is relatively low-lit, due to the pervasive light-dampening characteristics of all the dark woods. Some long exposures would be wonderful but photography is off-limits inside. When I was there it was mid-day and the light was pretty harsh. Nonetheless, I took a few color and infrared shots of the west-facing exterior. I believe the infrared converted to b/w images work the best. I took multiple exposures and blended them together which allowed for a rich depth of tones in the shadows and well-lit areas. The color images are less interesting to me, but I offer them as a juxtaposition.

If you love architecture and are in the LA area, you owe it to yourself to check out the Gamble House. If you have more time, there are several more Greene & Greene homes within walking distance, along the Arroyo Terrace. Discovering an architectural gem in the built environment can be almost as rewarding as exploring the wilderness. Almost.