My Snaps

Pasadena, CA

Pasadena, CA

Pasadena, CA

As I wrote earlier, part of the beauty of a drought-tolerant landscape is in saving money. Of course it conserves another valuable natural resource as well: water. Remember the movie “Chinatown”? It was all about water.

We live in a desert. You can’t have a naturally green lawn on the 15 inches of rain Southern California gets in a year. People have to pour inches of water just to get a spotty brown lawn; those who want a green yard have to pour more water than comes down naturally in a tropical climate (water that by the way either evaporates or drains through the porous soil).  To add injury to injury, all the fertilizer added to that soil-that-nature-didn’t-intend-to-be-a-lawn eventually makes it to the ocean where it creates huge algae blooms, which kills off marine life.

If saving money and water isn’t enough, I have to add that drought-tolerant landscaping also saves your back: No cutting and trimming the lawn every weekend, no watering every other day, no fertilizing, no aerating. Yes, there’s some work that needs to be done, but in comparison to a lawn…. almost nothing.

strap

After 30 years, the camera strap on my Leica gave out. Planned obsolescence?

cemetery, gettysburg, pa

cemetery, gettysburg, pa

“I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”

J.D. Salinger, died today at 91.

Recently, friend and fellow photographer Daniel Milnor posted photographs on his blog from last summer, when he was on assignment in DC. One of the pictures gave me a deja vu moment. I had been in DC last February and I, too, had photographed the White House.

No surprise – it’s not unusual for photographers to photograph one of the most photographed buildings in the USA. But I thought it was interesting that our framing had been eerily similar in an unconventional way: The White House takes up very little space, there’s a bunch of stuff in the foreground. (Some might even argue that they’re really bad photographs.)

Why does that happen?

Years ago I read “Art and Physics,” a book by Leonard Shlain. The subtitle was, “Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light.”  Shlain says he was moved to write the book because he was at a loss to explain art to his then 12-year-old daughter. “…though I knew  the intellectual context of each modern movement, I too didn’t really ‘get it.’” His book notes how, through the centuries, artists of the same era who didn’t know of each other were creating similar styles of work. Shlain also showed how art and science seemed connected in strange and parallel ways. For example, at nearly the same time physicist Albert Einstein was turning the science world inside out with his theories, the Futurist and Surrealist painters (like Picasso) were creating paintings that “fit perfectly if superimposed on Einstein’s theories.”

The book does provide some history on art and science. Subjects you know you want to know about but are too busy reading twitter feeds to actually read about. But this book is an interesting and a fairly quick read.  Plus you can quote from it and sound really smart at parties.

All this because I wanted to post some of MY pictures on MY blog and not be accused of copying Dan Milnor’s photographs!

You can see his version here.

washington, dc

washington, dc

washington, dc

Not too long ago I got a nice call from Adrian who was looking for a wedding photographer for his and his fiancee, Desiree’s, February wedding. We met over a coffee in LA. Even though the wedding was coming up rather quickly I asked if they would be interested in an engagement session. My thinking was that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend a couple hours getting to know each other before the big day. I not so subtly suggested an urban setting for the engagement photos. This made sense since they live downtown but frankly I’ve been really wanting to do a photo session in downtown LA. I love the energy of a big city and I often wander around downtown whenever I have a free moment.
The session was a lot of fun for me and I could have shot for hours into the night. Here are a few of the shots from the session.

Pasadena, CA

Pasadena, CA

Pasadena, CA

In the middle of the  night before the big parade in Pasadena, the organizers start to line up the finished floats. If you’re not a morning person this is a cool thing because you can go see, smell but not touch the floats and you don’t feel as if you’re missing anything in the morning. As a matter of fact you feel as if you were part of a group that got a special sneak preview.  Seeing the floats at night under artificial light adds a strangely eerie ambiance to the event.

A few years ago I dug up the the front and back lawns and with the help of Leslie and her husband Jukka, put in a drought tolerant landscape. Living in Southern California which is basically a desert there are many advantages to the drought resistant landscaping. And they’re almost all based on common sense. Let’s start with the rather obvious but probably least important, money.  The average american household dumps about 75 percent of their  household water use on their lawns. I dump almost nothing, saving me enough to buy more than a few rolls of film.

Pasadena, CA

Pasadena, CA

Pasadena, CA

Pasadena, CA