Showing posts with label events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label events. Show all posts

Oscar pre-pre-pre-pre-show

Friday morning I took a few minutes as I walked past the Kodak Theater to snap a few shots the setup for the impending 2009 Academy Awards. (I didn't go out of my way; this location I pass several times a week.)

No actual stars spend any time along Hollywood Boulevard except when there's a movie premiere or ceremony, but the town kowtows to those moments. For the Oscars, the entire stretch of the street between Highland and Orange is closed a full week before the show. Traffic is redirected for over 7 days for an event that technically lasts around 4 hours. It takes time to lay red carpet down the middle of the street.

The only thing I really meant to show you was how the red carpet that is laid down the hallway leading into the actual Kodak Theater--which is still open to the public for that week, and not closed until the weekend of the ceremony--is covered with plastic. As though that was some clever Oscar show trivia. So there are a couple pictures of that. But of course I couldn't stop at merely that.

I'll admit up front: There's not much in the way of fabulous photography, but there are pictures of the statues still wrapped in plastic, reporters... uh, reporting, the clear tent over the street, the opaque tent with the big "The Academy Awards" text that you'll see in every aerial shot during the hours leading up to the broadcast, and of course: Porta-Potties.

Never let it be said I don't cover topical things. I just do it my way.











20 Feb 2009

Swing on this

In mid-July the Australian performance troupe Strange Fruit put on a series of free shows in downtown Los Angeles. Their art involves swaying on fiberglass poles in a choreographed routine that is acrobatics and theater. The quartet tells a humorous love story set to music in a 20-minute show.

Neither my description nor the shots do it justice, but I attempted to capture some moments from their midday performance outside the Bank of America building on July 17.




















Swing on this II

As explained in this post, the performance troupe Strange Fruit performed free shows in downtown L.A. in mid-July. These are from their late afternoon performance on July 16.










Tilt-a-whirl

Experimenting with the 'sports' (high-speed) mode with the swinging and spinning carnival ride at the OC Fair.

Yankovic, "Weird Al"

Free with fair admission: A concert by "Weird Al" Yankovic.

However, the free seats were in the back, so this became an opportunity to play with the 12x zoom and image stabilization on the S3. Of course, that distance was too far for the flash to be of any use, and the subject was almost constantly moving, so this proved more a test of my ability to hold still while shooting.

Here's a sampling of the ones that came out reasonably clear (all things considered), documenting only a few of the myriad costume changes that Al made throughout the two-hour show, including all the hits.

"Eat It"
"The Saga Begins"

(replete with stormtrooper chorus line)


"Smells Like Nirvana"

"Amish Paradise"

"Fat"

Back to the ubiquitous Hawaiian shirt for the encore.

Riding

At the OC Fair:

An unusual rider caught my eye...


He got to go around again. And again.

Suck(l)ing at the Fair


The Orange County Fair was the first real outing with the new S3, and thus the shots reflect more me trying to figure out how to use the camera than actually getting much that's usable.

Case in point: Here the autofocus got the wood chips in the background clear but the suckling piglets slightly blurry.

Eh, it's a journey.

Clucked up

A couple shots from the Orange County Fair.

(This first one was actually taken by my talented girlfriend.)