Photo Essay L.A.
My recent photo walkabout in downtown Los Angeles led to some navel gazing about the relative value of photo essay image capturing for microstock sites. There were a lot of “travel” site and geographical name site photo image sales opportunities once I got going. But some of the shots I was most intrigued by did not transmit to a micropayment scenario. It is likely an administrator reviewing hundreds of images a minute will not grasp or be informed about the little details that make the image an introspective statement.
Case in point is the accompanying photo.This is a fabulous building in mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Submitting this photo on its own, I might be able to claim some regional Italian monastery or European church. But this fantastic piece of architecture stands in Los Angeles on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Normandie, surrounded by McDonald’s and Carl’s Junior hamburger restaurant and gleaming food court signs. A Red Line metro station is cunningly concealed across the street, leading to an underground tunnel for the subterranean train reaching from downtown Los Angeles to North Hollywood.
The stunning visual lines and “bones” of the architecture are marred by the ever-present telephone lines, one of many visceral tugs that strain against the quick and easy micropayment result. Factoring in bitmap editing for the RAW file means a lot of effort can go into what qualifiers inside a microstock site consider less than interesting. And many buildings have their own copyright, guarding their brand against would-be unauthorized resellers of their building’s image. The church is located right on the street with no frontage or borders, its edges come right up to Wilshire Blvd. bus stop signs and heavy traffic.
My challenge was to capture the most evocative image from my powerful 12 mega pixel camera without letting pedestrian bystanders and car traffic into the frame. This meant I had to shoot upwards, creating into-the-frame challenges that turned the shot “close”. Immediacy to the lens meant getting sharp focus of crenellations and sculpted elements of the church bell tower, while skewing the camera up skywards. Surrounding skyscrapers meant the shot was only going to happen from a few very limited angles, only one I had access to. Keeping enough resolution focus throughout the frame was tough, I kept jittering the switch. Even with the shimmy guard, I found myself resting my camera hand on a nearby bus stop sign pole and thumbing it.
Microstock often means having to say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t exist midair”. I envy photographers with helicopter pilot friends who can survey from the air and take special photographs that will doubtless reclaim value over time for their unique access and point of view.
But working from the ground, I had to get the best images in the “can” before the sun went down behind the nearby office towers. Sun “dries up” faster in downtown topographies, don’t ya know. The shadows thrown onto the building I could live with, but only to the degree I could capture the picture with the shadow lines harmonious with the building’s broad-facing visual detail.
Trying to get the bell tower and the main “cupola” of the church was difficult. Shooting almost straight up lost a lot of the detail from the church main structure I found so charming. The accessible area I could see offered only a few vantage points. The access meant kneeling into a crouch stance almost behind one side of the main ‘crown” section and positoning the camera at an angle to absorb the proper landscape.
But angled pictures end up as problems in the editing room. I kept grabbing images, knowing the lines of the building would give me some real fodder to work with in my digital darkroom. I had enough “pay” stock for the geographical area, this was just for me. The result I ended up with satisfied my photo lust for a gothic “airscape”. And it’ll look great in my photo gallery.
Trackbacks