The Hollywood Park Shoot

A few of you have asked me about Hollywood Park. Honestly, I think there's more to it than where I shot, but here is a shot of the 3 turrets I referred to in the Zoom Zoom post. I dodged and burned a little, and a little too much at that. One of these days I'll get better at that, but for this particular post it's not that important. This was shot with a Sigma 10-20 super wide angle lens. Oh yeah--if your subject is a turret, and it has a pointy top to it, don't cut off the top of it. This is the only one of the pictures of the 3 structures together that I kept, so I'll have to go back and do it again.

I mentioned that the Zoom Zoom picture was one of several. See the little windows in the turrets? There are little faces in there. I shot 3--here's a triptych.


The middle face is in the Zoom Zoom post. I think my dodging and burning is much better on these, but that may change--I haven't sharpened these yet. Converted to black and white using channel mixer. And actually, I'm going to crop #1 and #3 much closer to resemble the middle picture. I smell 16x20 on foamboard.

Zoom, Zoom

After seeing a picture in the Capture Arkansas project, I made a venture to Hollywood Park in Hot Springs. It's about halfway between Oaklawn and Hot Springs Country Club, in what seems to be a bit of a shady part of town. There are three odd turret-like structures made out of natural stone (I'll post a picture later); two of them have little "windows" in them, and in those windows are these little bas relief faces. Odd faces. Spooky little faces.

Anyway, I decided to try a zoom lens trick where you open the shutter and then zoom the lens before the shutter closes. I took over 30 shots, alternating between starting wide and zooming in, starting close in and zooming out, switching lenses, changing exposures, etc. I started with my super-ultra-wide Sigma 10-20 and learned that you don't get much action over 10mm, so I switched to my 18-135 and found that this worked better. Apparently, telephoto to wide is the way to go, although I'm not sure that's what I actually did on this shot. I was aiming to get something supernatural. I think I got close. I've got a few more that I'll post in an update later this week.

EXIF Data: D80 at ISO 100, f/16 for .60 sec., focal length variable.