Outside Lighting In

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (or Dusk)

Dateline Ventura County, Jan 16, 2012. A crisp winter evening in Santa Paula, up on a ladder waiting for the sun to get out of the picture...

My latest glowing architectural photography project is the Santa Paula Housing Authority's new senior affordable housing project named "The Orchards at Santa Paula." This image was created for McCarthy Companies, the project manager on this development, and will grace the invitation for the grand opening and probably the websites of everyone involved. 

It's a really cute place but it faces north, and while this may be great for photos in Australia this time of year, photography of north facing architecture in Ventura California is a real challenge. You can imagine the look on my client's face when I told them, "The best time to photograph your project is in six months at summer solstice... will that work for your grand opening invitation?"

Architectural photography in Southern California allows for a lot of sun-lighting variation but inevitably the south facing architecture is completed in summer and the north facing ones are ready in winter...

Must be Murphy's Law of solar frustration.

The solution is the always the same... "Wait 'til the sun goes down!"

As you can see from the afternoon photo...the backlit sunlight in the afternoon doesn't do The Orchards any favors, it's still a cute little project but it's not as warm and cozy as the dusk view. High-contrast sunlight on the back units, cool, low-contrast reflected light from the open sky on the shaded units in the foreground. Add dark windows and a blank cyan sky and it's pretty hard to get excited about any building in such unflattering light; and remember waiting for solstice is not an option since the grand opening is a week away. So with a ladder, a tall tripod, and cooperation from the staff to turn off sprinklers, remove the tree-stakes, and turn on all the lights, a very handsome photo was created with very little Photoshopping. Of course we had to stand around on-site waiting for the perfect moment, a window of twilight, the five minutes where the exterior sky and the interior lights match, before the sky goes black and the moment is gone.

Always happy to use available darkness whenever the sun is six months away.

 

The "F"-word & The HABS at the Edge of America

One of the most interesting HABS photography projects in a while took me to the bottom edge of America this month to photograph the San Ysidro Customs House in San Diego at the Tijuana border, shown here in this view from the public pedestrian entry tunnel into the USA.

 

Built as the original border station in 1932 for cars and pedestrians the Spanish Revival Building with a decorative cupola now sits beside the new high-tech border crossing where over twenty lanes of cars, vans and buses sit in longs lines on the 5 Freeway coming across the US/Mexico border.

 

click photos for a larger view >>>>>

 

The building has been a bit marginalized as the border crossing has expanded and enveloped the setting but the happy news is it will be adaptively reused instead of being demolished or moved to another location. The project worked out as a nice HABS documentation with help from the staff at the site even though we had planned to photograph overall context views from a building that had been demolished a week before we arrived at the site... surprise.

 

Cole Smothers, my assistant on this project, caught the photo below of me jammed into the corner of America, along side the high fences that surround the Customs House. This project was a challenge because most of the building was surrounded by fences, barricades and walls, making composition of the exterior facades a cram-me-into-a-corner-with-a-camera affair. Surprises make life interesting and support my faith in the "F"-word... Flexibility! 

 

Schaf in the Corner of America. Photo by Cole Smothers

Talented Masons, Opium Pipes, and a Big Hole in San Francisco

I like San Francisco in December, I hope it becomes a habit. A year ago I spent a drizzly December day doing a HABS-like documentation of a handsome brick building on Natoma Street in Downtown San Francisco. 

This was a small building documentation brought on by the construction of the new $4 Billion Dollar Transbay Transit Center that is replacing the old Timothy Pfleuger designed Transbay Terminal. Since the expansion plan for the project extended over multiple blocks it required demolition of some old and new buildings including 77 Natoma shown above, and I was commissioned to record the features, interior and context of the building before it was demolished.

CLICK ON PHOTOS FOR A LARGER VIEW

A year later the project has just made headlines worldwide as artifacts of the Gold Rush era began to surface at (or rather under) the construction site. The buildings on Natoma shown above including the newer, metal-clad, rounded one on the right and the old bus ramp on the left are all a big hole in the ground now, San Francisco's version of Boston's BIG DIG. Archeologists from William Self Associates are busy combing through the site and preserving the history of an 1880s residential neighborhood now long gone (probably replaced by commercial buildings similar to the one I documented at 77 Natoma).

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/development/2011/12/dig-sfs-transport-terminal-unearths-artifacts

This is how it all looks today in December 2011 from the roof of a building just down the block while I was in the city doing another couple HABS projects. The brick buildings are gone, the bus ramps are gone, the Pfleuger Terminal is gone and construction proceeds day and night - but opium pipes, chamber pots and porcelain doll heads from the 1880s keep telling stories. 

CLICK ON PHOTOS FOR A LARGER VIEW

Exercise in Lighting...(or lighting as exercise)

This week my photo assistant Dave Sanchez and I put in three long days in the Sierras above Bishop, California photographing a Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) documentation of some hydro-electric powerplants. In a way it was peaceful. Not because of the beautiful surroundings, the yellow Aspens, the clean air and the snow-capped peaks, because that did indeed make lunchtime attractive. No, the peaceful part was in our head. Because the generators and turbines were spinning the entire time, we had both the constant hum of the machinery and earplugs to avoid the din, forcing all communication to take the form of lip reading (short words) pointing and impromptu sign language (double peace-sign means f22); it gave us a lot of time to think.

The exercise regimen forced on Dave was required by a dark corner in the control room which stubbornly wanted to stay dark. There was little room to move, and less room to set up lights, though I tried before switching them on, only then seeing the brushed aluminum behind the new switches created a very effective reflector - right back into the camera. Changing gears, we went with the new LED spotlights I had brought, allowing the light to be focused into the old switchboard while avoiding the modern mirrored one opposite the camera. I wanted to avoid casting confusing shadows that might make it hard to understand the various gauges, buttons and levers on the panel so we used the "lightpainting" technique, allowing the movement of the lights to erase the edges of the shadows. While the dark corner would be easy to fix in Photoshop on a digital photo, the 5x7 film negatives need to be properly exposed because there is very little manipulation done in the darkroom, and usually only selective darkening of parts of a frame rather than lightening up shadowy areas. The unretouched result is shown above.

The video may be a little loud... it was inside the Powerhouse after all...

 

Here we are making the final photos, after we finished the large format views and the 5x7 camera was put away, we were doing the duplicate digital views from the same tripod position. The 5x7 film views required ten second exposures and the digital only three seconds each, but this is why assistants never gain weight on my projects. 

HABS Photographer Stephen Schafer Selected for Best of ASMP 2011

 

I'm excited to be one of twenty photographers chosen from more than 150 projects submitted by my peers for the seventh annual Best of ASMP 2011 (and the first HABS photographer).

The American Society of Media Photographers, founded in 1944, is the premier trade association for the world's most respected professional photographers. Promoting photographers' rights and providing education in better business practices.

The selected 2011 photographers run the gamut, from documentary to digital shot using a remote-controlled helicopter... and beyond. The twenty photographers have some pretty interesting stories about how and why they chose to execute their photographic vision, I'm just glad I could round out the mostly digital group with my state-of-the-art-1933 approach to HABS photography on the Ahwahnee. The interview has some fun photos of SF County Jail #3 along with photos of the Kaufmann House and Ennis House that will be donated to the Library of Congress HABS, HAER, HALS photography collection in the future.

The 20 Interviews at this link:  ASMP Best of 2011 Link

 

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MaD FLAWS Mnemonic for Seven Aspects of Integrity (National Register)

Up 'til midnight working on a Apple-Keynote slideshow for the CPF "Historic Context Statements" workshop in Norco, California... Now what were those damn 7 aspects of integrity for the National Register of Historic Places? Craftsmanship? Siting? I've gotta Google it...again.

Materials, Design, Feeling, Location, Association, Workmanship, Setting... this is the 46th time I've looked this up, how am I gonna remember this?

I need a Mnemonic to remember the seven aspects of integrity... MaD FLAWS

(MA-terials, D-esign, F-eeling, L-ocation, A-ssociation, W-orkmanship, S-etting)

Now, for some sleep.

-Schaf

Old Libbey Bowl Photos...

I had the pleasure of documenting Ojai's original Libbey Bowl in the Historic American Buildings Survey style a few weeks before its demolition in Summer 2010.

The HABS-like archival prints were donated to the Ojai Museum and will serve as a reminder of the design and architecture of the first bowl in Libbey Park. These final images capture a Nordhoff High School concert in the bowl, and details of the sun-dappled outdoor venue which was built between 1954 and 1957.

The original bowl was conceived, initiated, planned and built by famed local architect Austen Pierpont, and noted architect Roy C. Wilson of Santa Paula was also associated with the project.

   (click on photos to enlarge)

Today in the LA Times, architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne reviewed David Bury's new Libbey Park Bowl.

Link:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/06/architecture-review-david-burys-new-libbey-bowl.html

Libbey Bowl has been the backdrop for the appearances of world-reknowned musicians, performers and composers for over fifty years and this tradition will continue under its new arch. The Ojai Music Festival and other community events will now have a much more comfy venue to enjoy, and the termites and dry-rot are now all gone, but I hafta admit, a bit of the funkiness is gone too. 

 

Swiss Family Indian?

The next time we have out of town guests we're takin' them straight to Palmdale!

    The most amazing place to show off Hollywood, the American Dream, the desert landscape, and Native American Culture is the Antelope Valley Indian Museum State Historic Park. It may look like a Swiss chalet but the Swiss would never imagined this – it's classic folk-art-Americana. I expected to see Charles Phoenix there with a Disneyland tour.

  CLICK ON IMAGES FOR A LARGER VIEW>>>

    Howard Arden Edwards, a Holywood set designer, self-taught artist, and avid collector of Native American artifacts, originally conceived of the 1928 building – a cross between a Hollywood set, a Swiss chalet, a rustic craftsman house and the Batcave. More info here: http://avim.parks.ca.gov/ 

    

    Schaf Photo was commissioned by architect John Lesak of Page & Turnbull to photograph the site and show the thoughtful stabilization of the building. After a four-year rehabilitation, the AVIM is open with a discrete new geothermal climate control and an intricate cable-stay system, designed to hold the flimsy, set-like building together and keep it from blowing away in the relentless Antelope Valley winds. This was a digital color documentation and not a HABS/HAER project but this National Register of Historic Places site is worthy of documentation in the Library of Congress Historic American Buildings Survey collection. Perhaps in the future.

    

    

I hope our photos tell the story, but you have to

climb up the uneven stone stairs between the historic rooms

and see it yourself to believe it.

 

THIS JUST IN>>> Antelope Valley Indian Museum receives a prestigious 2011 Preservation Design Award by the California Preservation Foundation! 

Ennis House & Ahwahnee HABS (An Honor)

 

With the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite and Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis-Brown House in Los Angeles, 2010 proved to be a great year for HABS projects.

This was the year that we composed full documentations of these two buildings built in 1924 (Ennis) and 1925-1927 (Ahwahnee). It has been an honor. Both buildings were obviously worthy of documentation in the 5x7 format, but color digital images with GPS locations were also captured at the same time.

 

Click on photos for a larger view>>>

 

 

The negatives and prints will be released into the public domain upon acceptance at the Library of Congress; they will then be available for public upload and research at the LOC website.

 

Most importantly the negatives should still be in fine condition in the year 2510, just short of the 600 year anniversary of both buildings. (With California's earthquakes, fires and termites, I hope these amazing buildings still exist then too.)

 

2011 Here we come!

 

 

Sunrise Ahwahnee Hotel Yosemite

I thought I'd share the moment when the sun crests Halfdome and lights the east side ofthe Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, The site of my latest HABS project.

Click the arrow and see the sun come up...