January 9, 2010

• PhotoPost: The Year In Pictures 2008 Part 2

  

  Normally sometime around the middle of January I post my yearly wrap up of the previous years’ photography called “The Year In Pictures.” I wanted to supply a link to Last Year’s Post, which went online Jan. 8th, 2009, so I went back to the post and noticed I never finished it! I only posted Part 1. Oh, the horror. So, being the anal retentive personality I am, I cannot showcase my Year In Pictures 2009 till I finish the second half of 2008! So there you have it. Or, here you have it, as the case may be. As usual, these are NOT the photos which appeared on the individual Photoposts from the blog, for which I shall supply links.  These are NEW shots from the Webshots Gallery, never before posted on WhenWordsCollide. So let’s set the Wayback Machine to July 2008, shall we, and proceed from there.

  

  In July of 2008, I still lived with my roommate Cancerboy in the rented house in Lomita. When I began my Hollywood Project, (which still isn’t finished) I drove up into the Hollywood hills to get photos of the iconic sign. I posted the first of the Hollywood Photoposts  July 17th, and the second series in Sept., after Joel had passed away. This is the sign in the background from up in the hills.

  

  The Hollywood hills hike was the last I took before I had to use crutches because of my broken hip replacement. I should have been using at least a cane at the time, prescribed by one of my orthopaedists, but I was more interested in getting photos than fooling with a cane! This shot was taken on one of the winding residential roads leading up into the hills. 

  

  It was pretty strange that I ended up in a cemetary (The Hollywood Forever Cemetary, where a lot of deceased stars are buried) owing to the fact that when I got back home from this photo shoot, Joel’s brother had taken him into the hospital for the last time, from where he was transferred to a transition care facility, in which he died a week later. This is a rather interesting shot of an angelic gravestone marker with a ukelele slung over it’s shoulder.

  

  In August I prepared my home for my new roommate, to replace Joel. I posted photos of my progress in the Mike’s Extreme Makeover photopost. I also made a Mike’s Video Blog series, so even though I wasn’t “out and about” I was still supplying photo and video posts. I thought this photo of the living room was “too dark” when I created the photopost, but I kinda like the ambience in the photo now as I look at it for a second time. This was taken at night, and the only light source is the one you see by the side of the couch. The flash was turned off on this pic, and the photo I used was illuminated by the flash.

  

  Also in August I created my profile pic with the Nepalese hat, which I “inherited” from Joel, and always admired. Here is a shot that wasn’t used in the profile, but is for all those readers who like to see my mug from time to time. I’m not smiling in this shot, but I think it’s a good study. My eyes used to be a brighter blue. Now they seem to be graying along with my beard.

  

  Here’s another shot of me fooling around with my cane. This is after Mike, my short lived roommate already moved into the house. This is from September 2008 and is part of the photoshoot which resulted in the picture of me on crutches in the header of the “A Leg to Stand On” series of entries detailing my hip troubles and eventual operation.

  

  Also from September. This is a rare photo of my roommate Mike, who only lived with me for four months, after which he told me he just couldn’t pay his half of the rent. His fleeing gave me cause to find “my little house”, the mobile home I bought in February 2009. I like this photo of Mike because it looks as if he’s looking at the camera, which is impossible since he’s completely blind. In most of the photos I have of him, his eyes are “staring” off into space somewhere, but I think I called him right before I took this shot. I didn’t allow him to play this really impressive drum set while I was in the house either, so he couldn’t get “creative” unless I was at work. (I sometimes listened to him “jam”.)

  

  In early November 2008, after a long while without going out on a photoshoot, I deciced to bravely pack my camera and crutches, and take a drive downtown on a summery winter day. The Photoshoot resulted in the “Boyle Heights Sears and L.A. River Bridges” Photopost.  Here is the city skyline from one of the tributary streets leading into town.

  

  On the left is Disney Hall (where the L.A. Philharmonic orchestra plays), and in the center is the Library Tower (U.S. Bank Tower), tallest building in L.A. I like the angles in this shot, and how one of the breaks in the Disney Hall follows the skyscraper on the left.

  

  This is the Sears store in Boyle Heights shot from the rail yard under the 6th Street Bridge, with some graffitti painted on the side of the building in front of the Sears store.

  

  I like crawling through old abandoned lots to get “indurstrial” shots like this. I was close to a homeless compound along the L.A. river, so got out of this section pretty quickly. As I always like to point out, to the “homeless’ some of these places are their “home” and so I don’t want to impose on them. I take photos usually really early in the morning, so I can get architectural details without people in the shots.

  

  As is usual at the end of almost every year, I go crazy photographing because the weather is nice, and I usually think I haven’t taken that many “trips around town” and want to get more folders in my Webshots Gallery before the year ends. A week after I drove around shooting pics around the bridges of the L.A. river, I took the train/subway into downtown, still hobbling around on crutches, and took an amazing series of photos for my L.A. Dreams project. The Downtown Photopost showed up on the blog on Nov. 22. This was taken through the window of the place where I had a bagel for breakfast. This is one of my rare photos with a person in it. The guy is just walking along the street in front of the bagelry.

  

  A somewhat deserted L.A. street on a Sunday morning.

  

  I walked (on crutches, and carrying my camera bag slung over my shoulder) about six blocks. Here is Broadway Street, with the Eastern building in the background on the right side of the street.

  

  As luck would have it, there was a rainstorm the day before Thanksgiving, and so on Thanksgiving day, I gave thanks for all the fluffy white cumulus clouds the storm left in it’s stead, and grabbed my camera for the third consecutive weekend for another photoshoot. The results showed up in Thanksgiving Cloudscapes in mid December. As I go looking for shots I didn’t feature on the blog for these end of year wrapups, I sometimes pick photos that I forgot were already featured, and have to delete them from the list when I see I already put them in the photoposts. This shot of clouds above a chain link fence was one I figured I had already posted, but didn’t see it on the photopost. I really like this one. This is the photoshoot where I was pulled over by cops who wanted to see the photos I’d taken, since I was shooting cloudscapes over an oil refinery.

  

  A colorful shot of the cloudscape above a residential street in San Pedro. In the far distance, where the street is bisected by Harbor Street, which runs along the oceanfront, are tall container cranes for unloading the container ships in the harbor. San Pedro is one of the towns in which I looked for housing after Mike told me he needed to move out.

  

  The Star Kist Tuna statue. The building isn’t there anymore, but there was a pretty big Star Kist Tuna processing plant in San Pedro at one time.

  

  This is a shot of the Vincent Thomas suspension bridge from the Terminal Island side. Another of my “industrial” type shots. It isn’t all that evident, but the fence does have barbed wire on it.

  

  In closing, I’ll present a photo that doesn’t exist in ‘real life’. I caught the photo of the waste yard smokestack with San Pedro painted on it while driving down the freeway. The original photo is crooked, shot while I was speeding down the freeway. The sky was clear behind the smokestack at the time. This was shot later in the day, and the clouds were already being chased away by the afternoon breezes. I substituted a cloudscape from another of my photos. So this is really one of my composites, although you never would have known if I didn’t tell you.

  Well, that’s the rest of the 2008 Year In Pictures, about a year late. I’ll post three or four more entries, and then when this one falls from the front page of the blog, I’ll post my annual “Year In Pictures 2009″ PhotoPost.  

  • 3:15 pm
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