February 24, 2021
Forget about it Jake, it's Chinatown
It's a good line for pictures of LA's Chinatown, but he wasn't referring to the Chinatown you'll see in the photos here, he was talking about Old Chinatown that was razed to construct LA's Union Station in the late 1930's. What we now call Chinatown used to be known as Sonoratown and was an old Latino neighborhood as well as LA's Little Italy.
I watch quite a few YouTube videos produced by other photographers, some on astrophotography and others on landscape photography. I mainly watch for techniques I might not know, both shooting and processing, as well as gear ideas. A few days ago I was looking for videos on processing 720nm IR portraits and ran across a Latino photographer based in Seoul Korea. He had some good tips on IR photography and even video. But one of the things that he shoots is Seoul at night. For most photographers, shooting at night involves hauling out the tripod so that you can shoot at the camera's base ISO and avoid noise and capture the darkest detail. He doesn't do this, he shoots handheld at a higher ISO and the lets the darks be dark and concentrate on not blowing out the highlights. The results are a bit dark and many would consider the shots to be underexposed, but the results are pleasing. I decided to try this approach myself and headed down to Chinatown and Little Tokyo. Chinatown didn't have many businesses that were open(during a pandemic and on Superb Owl Sunday, who would have thunk) so most of the signs on the buildings were not lit. I've tried to bring out a bit of a hint of the structure of buildings that are in the darkness, but have left the details to the darkness in most cases.
Read MoreIt's a good line for pictures of LA's Chinatown, but he wasn't referring to the Chinatown you'll see in the photos here, he was talking about Old Chinatown that was razed to construct LA's Union Station in the late 1930's. What we now call Chinatown used to be known as Sonoratown and was an old Latino neighborhood as well as LA's Little Italy.
I watch quite a few YouTube videos produced by other photographers, some on astrophotography and others on landscape photography. I mainly watch for techniques I might not know, both shooting and processing, as well as gear ideas. A few days ago I was looking for videos on processing 720nm IR portraits and ran across a Latino photographer based in Seoul Korea. He had some good tips on IR photography and even video. But one of the things that he shoots is Seoul at night. For most photographers, shooting at night involves hauling out the tripod so that you can shoot at the camera's base ISO and avoid noise and capture the darkest detail. He doesn't do this, he shoots handheld at a higher ISO and the lets the darks be dark and concentrate on not blowing out the highlights. The results are a bit dark and many would consider the shots to be underexposed, but the results are pleasing. I decided to try this approach myself and headed down to Chinatown and Little Tokyo. Chinatown didn't have many businesses that were open(during a pandemic and on Superb Owl Sunday, who would have thunk) so most of the signs on the buildings were not lit. I've tried to bring out a bit of a hint of the structure of buildings that are in the darkness, but have left the details to the darkness in most cases.
