Ladera Heights

• Henry Morton Stanley.

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When I was about to move to Los Angeles 6 years ago, like anyone else undertaking a cross country move to a city you have only visited once as a child, I googled Los Angeles. The Wikipedia entry for the city had an absolutely stunning image of the Los Angeles skyline with the snowcapped mountains in the background. It took me a year to finally figure out the location from where you can take the photo.

The first time I visited this location, I was introduced to the bane of photography in Socal, the everpresent smog. I couldn’t even see the mountain and the smog also robbed the skyline image of their sharpness. I later learned that rain would take care of the smog for a short period of time and just after a rainstorm is when you take that beautiful image of LA. Now that sounded straightforward to me until we realized that it didn’t rain for the first two years, we were in LA. Another aspect was the traffic, this park is in the busy Culver City area which seems to be always under construction.

Eventually, this image went away from my mind until last week when I was coming home and suddenly remembered about this spot. Traffic was still nasty, but I was on my motorcycle so decided to quickly see if rainy winter of 2019 has any effect on the view. The recent rains we are having meant the mountains were finally visible and they had a decent bit of snow on them, there was very little smog and I was excited to get the image finally. So I returned in the evening for my sunset shot of the beautiful skyline of Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, by the end of the day, the cloud cover became thick and robbed the sky of any color during sunset and a bit of sharpness during the blue hour. I am now thinking of returning on a morning after a rain to see if I’d have any better luck.

Panorama edit of the view from Kenneth Hahn Park showing more of the snowy mountain range.

• Gustave Flaubert.

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As a nature and landscape photographer, its often easy to get lured into magic world of panoramas. I remember initially how the desire to capture the wide perspective used to be so strong every time I visited a grad vista. It took me a lot of time to perfect my panorama technique and included adoption of new shooting techniques and newer camera support hardware to achieve the desired level of quality in my panorama images. So, you can imagine my excitement when I walked to Kenneth Hahn State Park and saw this view. This was a shot I had in mind for a long time and finally I was there with a clear view of the San Gabriel Mountains.

As per my experience to get a decent panorama shot, it is extremely important to get your exposure correct. As wide scenes tend to have dramatically wide gamut of dynamic range, I often practice exposing for the bright points in the scene. This involves pointing my DSLR at the brightest point in the scene and getting an exposure reading and then using exposure compensation to get the histogram correct. Once I am satisfied, I set dial my camera reading to manual mode, this allows consistent settings across the panorama. Second setting that I’d like to settle is the focusing point, I usually try to manually fine tune my focus and leave it there so the that the camera will not try to refocus while trying to shoot the panorama. Once the exposure and focus is nailed down, majority of the work is done, now it’s time to get to the shoot. And for that its absolutely important that you have solid tripod, or a good handheld shooting technique. I love my arca-swiss monoball tripod head for panoramas as it has the panning mechanism at the top (close to the clamp) that allows for a quick set up. The other guidelines I follow is to not use a polarizing filter (if the comp has sky in it), at least allow for 30% overlap between shots, and shoot more that you think you will need for your composition. Now the challenge with panorama landscape shots are the facts that you have to do all this while the light is fading or changing constantly. I can say from experience that it really helps to nail a panorama routine to do this quickly.

Los Angeles downtown with mountains as a backdrop. This shot was taken from Kenneth Hahn State Recreational Area