I’ve added a new Travel Photo Essay on Crossroads of the World, a delightful relic of the 1930s in Hollywood. It’s unknown to most visitors despite being two blocks away from the tourist-swarmed Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. Originally an outdoor shopping mall, it’s now a city block of “unique offices” in Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, and ersatz international styles.
When I visited on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in January, the Hollywood & Highland Center and the surrounding block of Hollywood Boulevard were jam-packed. (Are there really that many people who have “use it or lose it” vacation time from work to use up, as I did?) But I had Crossroads of the World all to myself.
I rode Metro Rail to get there, as it’s a short walk from the Hollywood/Highland Red Line station. That’s much easier than driving. On the way, I stopped at Union Station— another building from the 1930s in the Streamline Moderne style— and took some new pictures that I wasn’t able to take when I was last there in 2010. I’ve added them to an expanded essay on Los Angeles Union Station.
I’ve also updated my review of PaintShop Pro to include the new X4 version.
In response to an inquiry about a horizontal picture of Montezuma Castle National Monument in Arizona, I went through the archived raw files from my 2005 trip to Sedona, found a nice picture that filled the bill, and added it to the Indian Country page.
I have an improved version of a picture of the Point Vicente Lighthouse in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, that I originally took in 2005. I also have improved versions of Brick Tower, Spring Flowers in Palos Verdes, and Kitesurfers at Malaga Cove, all in Palos Verdes Estates.
Continuing the theme of the Palos Verdes Peninsula (a coastal suburb of Los Angeles), I have a much improved “performance” of the Sea King March, the “fight song” of Palos Verdes High School that I originally wrote for their marching band in 1975 when I was a student there. I’ve had a version of the march on that page since 2002, when I made a new arrangement for the school’s reopening. It’s a MIDI file that most computers can play through the music synthesizer built in to their sound hardware. The new version is an MP3 file, played by a “virtual pep band.” It’s still synthesized, but the high-quality instrument samples I used make a sound that comes close to a real 23-piece band. While this is mainly meant for students and alumni of Palos Verdes High, other visitors might also enjoy listening to it.
Finally, I’ve made some updates and corrections to my discussion of browsers and color management.
In addition to being a popular destination for visitors to Southern California, Santa Monica is one of the very few places in the Los Angeles area where it’s practical to get around without driving. Like Downtown Los Angeles, it’s a fairly compact region, making it easy to avoid notoriously snarled traffic and costly parking by walking or riding a convenient bus. That’s just one of the reasons it’s a nice place to spend a short vacation, whether you have to travel 20 or 2,000 kilometers to get there.
I have two new Travel Photo Essays about Santa Monica. The first is about the landmark Santa Monica Pier. The second is about Bergamot Station and The Water Garden. Bergamot Station, a complex of abandoned warehouses repurposed as an art center, shares top billing with the Pier in guidebook listings of Santa Monica attractions. The Water Garden is a lushly landscaped office complex built around an artificial lake. It isn’t in any guidebook, even though it’s across the street from Bergamot Station. But it’s well worth a look.
I was also fortunate to capture an elusive Southern California sunset of travelogue quality. Beautiful sunsets are elusive because the ocean and mountains that create great coastal scenery also make “low clouds and fog” a frequently-occurring phrase in weather forecasts. At the beach, even a sunny day may dawn with a “marine layer” of gray overcast that eventually burns off, and then returns as sunset approaches. Low clouds may also lurk off the coast and swallow the setting sun, instantly turning a promising sunset dull gray. That’s what happened on two of my three evenings in Santa Monica.
Speaking of gray, I have a new version of Beach Footprints, a picture I originally took in Laguna Beach in 2005 and added (in color) to the Fine Art section in 2008. When I recently looked at it again, I decided it would have more impact in black and white.
Finally, rather than offering generic “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings,” I’ll specifically wish everyone (chronologically): Io Saturnalia, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Winter Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, and/or Happy New Year!
Happy Halloween, Samhain, All Saints’ Day, or Reformation Day, as appropriate! (While it’s not new, this pumpkin still life is seasonally appropriate. I took it in 2007 on Naples Island in Long Beach, California.)
I have finished the final Travel Photo Essay from my June visit to Downtown Los Angeles. This one is about the public art in the Financial District and Little Tokyo. The Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), whose funding has played a major role in revitalizing the once-decaying Downtown, has long required developers to dedicate at least 1% of their CRA/LA funding to public art. This requirement has produced many modern sculptures throughout Downtown, for the enjoyment of residents and visitors alike. The Travel Photo Essay includes 18 new pictures, one of which is the 1,500th picture on this Web site.
I have also made some updates to the Links and Reviews section. I’ve replaced a very outdated review of the Opera browser with a new discussion of three current browsers (including Opera) and how they handle color management and wide-gamut monitors.
I’ve removed the review of PocoMail, the excellent e-mail program I’ve used for nearly a decade. The developer has announced that he will stop selling it at the end of the year. And I’ve updated the discussion of text editors to include the freeware Notepad++. I explain why I recently switched to it after years of using UltraEdit.
Finally, as we head into the Holiday Season, please keep in mind that prints of my pictures make excellent gifts!
I have added a new Travel Photo Essay on another Downtown Los Angeles architectural landmark: the very modern (and very opulent) Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.
To accommodate new pictures from my Downtown Los Angeles “staycation” in June, I have split the Historic Landmarks page. The new Victorian Landmarks page has nine new pictures of the Bradbury Building (used as a setting in Blade Runner and many other movies and television series) along with the Angels Flight funicular railway. The 1920s and 1930s Landmarks page has three new pictures of Los Angeles City Hall (also featured in movies and television), along with the Millennium Biltmore Hotel and Los Angeles Union Station. I have also made some updates to Some Pocket Instamatic and 126 Resources, the article on Adobe’s DNG format for raw image files, and the review of Paint Shop Pro.
Not long after I took my pictures inside the Bradbury Building, a wedding party behaved disruptively during a photo shoot there. The real estate development company that owns the building responded with an absolute and apparently permanent prohibition of all “personal photography” on the premises. Hollywood filmmakers with full liability insurance who pay a suitably lucrative location fee presumably can continue to shoot in the building. It’s unfortunate that the owner reacted to one incident of abuse by punishing everyone else, especially since they previously were very tolerant of photography in that unique and beautiful location. But it’s perhaps understandable that they’d choose a complete ban, as that’s the easiest policy to enforce. I was very fortunate to visit when I did.
The kilometer and a half of Hollywood Boulevard between Highland Avenue and Vine Street is at the heart of the glamorous Tinseltown mythos created by the studios that once made movies in Hollywood. It’s on every Los Angeles guidebook’s “must see” list, and may actually be the city’s most popular visitor destination.
Despite being a Los Angeles native, I had never visited this “must see” place until last April. That’s not just because of the common phenomenon of ignoring local tourist destinations. I never found this one very appealing. I’m not a frequent moviegoer, and I rarely watch television. When I see the covers of People and Us magazines at the supermarket checkout, I draw a blank at the names of all the celebrities. Those popular publications might as well be written in Estonian or Basque.
But recently I’ve been enjoying visits to local destinations I can get to using mass transit. (That avoids the traffic that otherwise sucks all the pleasure out of exploring my fascinating home town.) Since the thoughtful planners of the Metro Rail Red Line subway built stations at both ends of the Walk of Fame, it seemed time to go there. As I lack a proper appreciation of Hollywood’s manufactured mystique, my new Travel Photo Essay offers a somewhat different perspective from what you’ll find in guidebooks.
The first new Travel Photo Essay from my “staycation” in Downtown Los Angeles last month is about Little Tokyo, one of the three remaining “Japantowns” in the United States. Although most of Downtown’s historic Japanese community has succumbed to relentless modern redevelopment, enough remains to make the compact National Historic Landmark District well worth a visit. What also helps is that it’s a living center of Japanese culture, with Buddhist temples, restaurants, and shops frequented by members of the large Japanese-American community who live elsewhere in the Los Angeles area (and also by business travelers from Japan).
While anyone claiming that Little Tokyo offers “a trip to Japan without the jet lag” would be guilty of serious exaggeration, it does provide some reasonably authentic transplanted glimpses of Japan. That’s what I’ve tried to capture in my pictures.
I’ve added two new pictures of public art near the Bunker Hill Steps to the Downtown Superlatives page. Also on that page is a new picture of the Library Tower that I’m particularly pleased with. It’s an example of why it’s good to always carry a camera. I was walking back to my hotel after dinner, and the picture presented itself.
I spent some “use it or lose it” vacation time earlier this month on a trip that began with a walk of about 100 meters down the street for a $2 one-hour bus ride to Downtown Los Angeles. No ancillary fees, no lost luggage, no waiting (without shoes) to be irradiated in a strip search machine and/or “intimately” patted down. I also avoided burning $4-a-gallon gas into greenhouse emission while going nowhere on a clotted freeway, on the way to a parking lot that charges $5 per half-hour.
Instead of the weekend day trips I’ve made before, I stayed at the historic Biltmore Hotel. I mention this because a friendly member of the hotel’s security staff showed me the Crystal Ballroom. The largest and fanciest of the Biltmore’s meeting rooms, it’s probably best known as the place where the charter members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences met for a luncheon in 1927 to plan an award ceremony. The ballroom is normally closed to the public. But this guy was so (understandably) proud of working for “such a beautiful hotel” that he went out of his way to unlock the door so I could see Giovanni Smeraldi’s “Italian renaissance revival” decoration and painted ceiling. I’ve added two pictures of the Crystal Ballroom to the Biltmore section of Downtown Los Angeles Historic Landmarks.
By the way, the Downtown hotels all charge between $35 and $50 per day for parking. Other parking options may cost even more than that. That’s another compelling advantage of buses or Metro Rail trains! Downtown may be the only place in Los Angeles where a car is an unnecessary burden.
One of the great things about a “staycation” is that it’s so easy to revisit places and take new pictures in better light. (OK, I’ll concede that’s probably the only thing about a “staycation” that even remotely qualifies as great.) I have replaced the old “establishing shots” of the Bonaventure and the Central Library with much better ones, taken just before sunset. I also added two new pictures of the Library at dusk, including a nice reflection in one of the pools in Maguire Gardens. There’s also one more new reflection, of City Hall in the glass exterior of Los Angeles Police headquarters. It’s temporarily in the Fine Art section until I create a permanent home for it, and for the other new pictures I took on this trip.
I have also written a review of Topaz InFocus, a plug-in for Photoshop that “deblurs” images. It’s invaluable not only for the advertised use of restoring details to slightly unsharp pictures, but for routine “capture sharpening” of raw digital camera files and film scans. For some years I have been using an older “deblurring” plug-in called Focus Magic for those purposes (I also have a review of it). But its developer has yet to release a version that either works with 64-bit Photoshop or installs reliably under 64-bit Windows 7. When I switched to 64-bit Photoshop, I had to abandon Focus Magic in favor of InFocus. My review of InFocus also compares the two plug-ins.
I have completely rewritten my Travel Photo Essay on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The new edition includes greatly improved versions of the 11 pictures I originally prepared in 1999, along with 12 new pictures.
Ted Marcus’ Virtual Light Table has been on the Web for twelve years. It’s exciting to look through the log summaries each week and see so many people from all over the world visiting my site, along with the astonishing variety of search queries that lead them to its pages. It’s even more exciting when some of those visitors order prints or image licenses!
I have overhauled one of the oldest parts of this Web site. “Grand Teton and Yellowstone” was one of the four Travel Photo Essays I uploaded to to the “personal Web space” of my dial-up Internet account on 18 April 1999. I added a few pictures in 2002, and removed the handful of Yellowstone pictures when I created a new Travel Photo Essay on that park in 2007. But otherwise it remained much as it appeared in 1999, including the versions of the pictures I prepared using a Hewlett-Packard Photosmart scanner, its crippled native software, and Paint Shop Pro version 5.
The new versions of the pictures are significant improvements over the ones I made in 1999 and 2002, with much more vibrant color. I also rewrote the text, and added five new pictures. (This page shows how my film-scanning tools and techniques have improved over the years.)
I have added a new special version of Verdant Hillside - Paso Robles, California to the collection of higher-resolution images available for free download as “wallpaper.” I use this picture as the “wallpaper” on my own computer desktop. It’s formatted for wide-screen LCD monitors in 1440x900 and 1680x1050 sizes. The “wallpaper” editions of two Grand Teton pictures, Teton Window and Mount Moran in Autumn, have been updated with the new versions.
I’ve updated several of the Commentary pages, notably Some Pocket Instamatic and 126 Resources. And finally, I have given the site a minor face lift. Commentary pages (like this one) have a new font that I hope will be easier to read. The home page also has a new logo and some formatting improvements.
My latest Travel Photo Essay is about two well-known Los Angeles attractions, the La Brea Tar Pits and the Farmers Market. It includes 15 new pictures. Both places are within a kilometer of each other, and owe their existence to the oil fields under the Los Angeles Basin.
Although I rode the Metro Rail light rail system on my recent “staycation” trips to Downtown Los Angeles, this time I had to drive. Metro Rail doesn’t go anywhere near that area, which straddles the Wilshire Boulevard “Miracle Mile” and the Fairfax district. And according to the Metro Trip Planner Web site, going by bus would take three hours— and as many different buses— each way. This is a typical example of why guidebooks advise visitors to Los Angeles against relying on mass transit.
Ted Marcus’ Virtual Light Table made its Web debut on 18 April 1999.