Cafe Opera & Bakery
Roadside Americana
Nikon D7000 18-200mm @ 40mm ISO 200 1/125 F/11 Lr4, TpzSim; PsCS6
On Myrtle Avenue in the pedestrian friendly Old Town, Monrovia, California. There are quite a few restaurants and retauraunt/bars in this neighborhood.
To view in high resolution or to purchase this or similar prints please click here: http://goo.gl/DDUfc
Wall Detail #130
Nikon D7000 10-24mm @ 24mm ISO 200 1/125 f/11 Lr4, TpzSim; PsCS6
This is a section of the wall depicted in my last post. I found the color and textures of the brick and mortar interesting, and the remnants of the painted advertising information.
To view in high resolution or to purchase this or similar prints please click here: http://goo.gl/DDUfc
Back Door of Commerce
Nikon D7000 10-24mm @ 12mm ISO 200 1/50 f/11 Lr4, TpzSim; PsCS6
This is a section of commercial building wall that originally faced an alley behind “D” Street in Chino, California. This was the home of a hardware store at one time. I was attracted by the textures, colors and remnants of commerce painted on the wall.
To view in high resolution or to purchase this or similar prints please click here: http://goo.gl/DDUfc
Waiting For The Light
Nikon D7000 10-24mm @ 24mm ISO 640 3-bkts f/25 Lr3, HEP1, TpzSim; PsCS5
It was an early summer evening in Glendora, California when we came upon this scene. The light changed to green and the woman went on here way, and we proceeded across and up the street to capture shop windows in the fading light.
Corner Bakery
Interpretive Digital Imaging
Nikon D80 18-135mm @ 22mm ISO 250 1/400 f/11 Lr3, TpzSim; PsCS5
This is a re-interpretation of the image featured in my “Man Cannot Live By Eating Cake Alone…” blog post. When I first processed this image, rendering it as a straight forward HDR color image just did not speak to me, which is why I went with the sepia toned black & white. After I re-approached the color image this time around I followed my instinct to imbue it with painterly effects and I am very happy how this works for me. This is a far more expressive image than a straight color image, HDR or not, would be.
Signal Tower & Bridge Superstructure
Interpretive Digital Imaging
Nikon D7000 10-24mm @ 10mm ISO 1600 1/640 f/13 Lr3, ASSA3; PsCS5
This is the signal tower and west end of the pedestrian bridge at the Riverside, California Metrolink Station. In addition to the stairways, patrons are served by an elevator in the west brick tower and one in the east brick tower, which was the only way I was able to get up on the bridge for yesterday’s image of the freight passing through.
This image is another example of my practicing simplifying images from the initial photo realism in order to convey more of a general feeling of the subjects (instead of a literal representation) so that the viewers’ minds can fill in any details they may imagine. There is just the hint of the train in the background of this image, but I believe it is enough to enable the viewer to understand there was a train there.
There was much more detail of individual bricks in the elevator tower in my original capture and I purposely softened the detail and over saturated the coloring of the bricks. I also liked the two converging lines from the crosswalk and upped the saturation and brightness of those as they converged on the tower and bridge. And of course the processes I applied, including the introduction of a canvas texture resulted in a very painterly rendering. (This and all of my images are in my gallery and the tools in the gallery will allow you to see the images in full size or near full size, then the texture will become quite apparent.)
The Dance Studio
Nikon D7000 10-24mm @ 14mm ISO 640 3-bkts f/11 Lr3; HEP1
The sign in the window caught my eye as I reconnoitered this old brick building at the corner of Lemon Street and University Avenue in Riverside, California. The handrail along the sidewalk made me think of a ballet barre, a juxtaposition of significance in my mind. This building is now known as the Life Arts Center and it leases space to visual and performing artists, it was originally constructed in 1909 as the Riverside YMCA and was owned by the Church of Scientology at one time and was developed to its present state by group headed by a man that splintered from the Church of Scientology. There is an interesting article about the history of the building here in the Riverside Press Enterprise.
Another notable feature of this image is that this building continues the local motif of arched windows in the Spanish/Mission Revival style.
The Annex
Another Time
Nikon D7000 18-135mm @ 62mm ISO 400 3-bkts f/16 Lr3, HEP1; SEP2
Across Sixth Street from the back side of the hotel, sits the Mission Inn Annex in Riverside, California. As reported in the Riverside Press Enterprise:
The crumbling brick structure behind Riverside’s historic Mission Inn has housed staff and servants, a series of shops, and finally storage, but it has been largely unused for years.
Built in two sections in 1913 and 1926, the annex began as living quarters for first female [which may explain the foot bridge over the street connecting the annex to the hotel and keeping female staff isolated from the street] and then male inn workers. The upper floors were used by the private staff — butlers and maids — of inn guests, said Kevin Hallaran, an archivist for the Riverside Metropolitan Museum.
Now the Mission Inn annex is being considered for a makeover. Riverside city officials are interested in turning the annex into conference space to complement the planned expansion of the nearby convention center.
The building facade is beautiful, however it seems the interior is crumbling and is far from being up to code. The city of Riverside seems to be well attuned to its architectural heritage and I hope they can rehabilitate this structure. Worth noting are the rounded arches creating a colonnade along the front of the building’s perimeter, mimicking the arches in the Spanish/Mission Revival architecture of the Mission Inn across the street. You will find this arch motif in other period structures throughout downtown Riverside.
After initial processing of this image I spent some time working with the color version and tweaking it using Nik’s Color Efex Pro, but in the end decided that it might work better without the full color spectrum and converted it with Nik’s Silver Efex Pro. I darkened the automobiles and brought their clarity down, while simultaneously pushing up the detail in the building facade, applied a sepia tone, added vignetting and added the burned edges of the border, all to bring the image back to its period in time.
The 35er
Nikon D7000 18-135mm @ 24mm ISO 1250 3-bkts f/8 Lr3; HEP1
Long a fixture on Colorado Boulevard in Old Town, Pasadena, California, this is the rear “patio” of the venerable dive bar, on the Mercantile Place side of the block. I think I am really attracted to a lot of the brickwork I find here, and I will probably return just to get some “stock” images of brickwork to keep on hand as textured backgrounds.
Brick Alley #3: Turning Daylight In To Night
Nikon D7000 18-135mm @ 28mm ISO 1250 3-bkts f/8 Lr3; HDR Efex Pro
This image was actually captured at 5:28 P.M. on March 5, a day when the sun set at 5:52 P.M. and the ambient light conditions were quite different
Nikon D7000 18-135mm @ 28mm ISO 1250 1/15 f/8 Lr3
than depicted in this rendering. The scene is an alley off of Mercantile Place in Old Town, Pasadena, California. The original center exposure is on the right. I achieved the final image by converting the camera raw file in to .DNG using Lightroom, then processed the three brackets through HDR Efex Pro, tweaking overall exposure, contrast structure, saturation, white and black point, and then used Nik control points to further tweak the left foreground, the human figures, and the sky using some of the same adjustments. Sharpening, noise reduction and vignetting then occurred in Lightroom.
Some might consider this over processing in terms of the saturation and artificially changing the perceived time of day, but I really wanted to feature the brick work and set a mood, so I exercised my creative license. I really like my final rendering.
Man Can Not Live By Eating Cake Alone…
Nikon D80 18-135mm @ 22mm ISO 250 3-bkts f/11 Lightroom3, HDR Efex Pro; SEP2
But without some cake once in a while, there is no icing in life. Chino, California locals can find their cake and icing at the Royalty Cakes at 7th & D Street at what remains of the original Chino downtown. This block of buildings, (apparently commonly known as the Thomlinson Buildings) fronted on D Street and extending from this corner west, past an alleyway to 6th Street are the last vestiges of original, period, business structures in “downtown” Chino. I am not certain how far back in time they go, I tried contacting the city Development Agency to get some history, but have so far not been successful. Any other commercial buildings, which I believe stood across D Street, were bulldozed and replaced by the Chino Civic Center in the latter part of the 20th century, and while it consists of modern buildings in a park like setting, the Civic Center buildings (City Hall, local courts, police department) just do not have the same charm or ambiance of life in an earlier time that the Thomlinson Buildings have.
You do not see a lot of brick used in construction in Southern California, particularly in contemporary architecture, so that is another reason why the Thomlinson Buildings are a treasure. The large building in the right background looming over the Thomlinson Buildings is the Robert Pile Chaffee College Chino Information Technology Center (a mouthful of a name if I ever heard one). Chaffee is a well established two year institution that has its home in Rancho Cucamonga, the IT center that was erected just a few years ago on land controlled by the Chino Development Agency, Chaffee also has a classroom facility in a former bank building about a block away on Central Avenue, and has begun building a satellite campus in south central Chino, and has completed three contemporary buildings there. What I like about the IT Center building is its extensive use of brick and classic architectural style, which I believe compliments and enhances the ambiance of the Thomlinson Buildings area.
As with all my images, I originally captured this image in color, and I like the way the color HDR image (HDR Efex Pro) emerged, but I felt I had to render this in black and white with sepia toning applied (Silver Efex Pro 2), to help convey that these buildings represent an earlier era, and to demonstrate my respect for our past. SEP was also used to create the vignetting and the burned edge border.
