Sponsor:
| « | April 2006 | » | ||||
 |
||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | ||||||
You just need to rest your eye on where the clutter isn't.
Note, when George Eastman got fed up with dry-plate photography his solution was to coat paper with a layer of plain, soluble gelatin, and then with a layer of insoluble light-sensitive gelatin. After exposure and development, the gelatin bearing the image was stripped from the paper, transferred to a sheet of clear gelatin, and varnished with collodion - a cellulose solution that forms a tough, flexible film. So that was that. Then he worked out transparent roll film and the roll holder, and folks out here were in business.
This photograph was taken with a digital camera - no film involved at all. No wonder the Kodak folks aren't doing that well these days.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, taking up the whole block bounded by Hope Street, Grand Avenue, 1st and 2nd Streets, is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. It's a Frank Gehry building and around the time it opened, on October 23, 2003, there were a few photos and reviews of the thing in these pages here. From January of this year you'll find a long shot of the building, in its context, here (bottom of the page). The Los Angeles Philharmonic used to perform at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion across the street, a dead hall with lousy acoustics, and everyone says this one is not only better, it's wonderful. Reviews of the exterior are mixed.And that makes it an odd place to have a pocket park, but they have one, the small Walt Disney Concert Hall Garden, on the east side of the building. What grows there are species that thrive in full, brutal sun. Anything else would get cooked dead - even after dulling the reflective steel panels it's viciously hot there.After the construction, additional expenses were incurred to correct the design flaw caused by the concert hall's unique choice of polished stainless steel covering concave surfaces. Residents of the neighboring condominiums suffered significant glare caused by the sunlight that was reflected in the manner similar to a parabolic mirror. The sunlight made the rooms of some nearby condominiums unbearably hot, and caused the air-conditioning costs of these residents to sky-rocket. Also during certain points of a sunny day the reflective surfaces caused the temperature of some adjacent sidewalks to rise to almost 140 degrees Fahrenheit. After complaints from neighboring buildings and residents the county government stepped in and asked Disney to come up with a solution, their response was a computer analysis of the building's structure, after the offending surfaces were identified, they were sanded to reduce glare in 2005.
Here's a shady spot -