It's a fascinating building and I've been planning on shooting it for years. I finally got my chance last April when I was staying in downtown LA over a weekend. I walked around it for more than two hours on a gorgeous, cloudless Saturday evening during the Golden/Blue hours trying to find the right angle and the right light. I shot probably 200+ exposures, most of them 3 shot +/- 2 EV HDR and when I finished I thought that I might have some good images, only to be disappointed once I got them into the MBP for processing.
The image I uploaded above is ok but I just don't think I captured particularly well how it's constantly changing and interacting with the light which is what attracted it to me in the first place. On top of that I found a couple of things a bit frustrating, I was really disappointed with all of the foot and auto traffic around it (a bit naive of me I suppose) and trying to get a clean shot is an exercise in frustration. It seems like wherever you set up the tripod there are always traffic lights or lamp standards in the way and while I'm not against it I'm not big on removing complicated stuff in post as I'm a bit of a perfectionist and getting it to look right is generally difficult.
In the evening the light is behind it so maybe I need to go back and try in the early morning with the light directly on the building and with some ND filters to get rid of the (hopefully) lower levels of traffic. Of course hanging around downtown LA by yourself early in the morning carrying expensive camera gear is probably not the smartest thing to do ... Ah well, I probably need to plan better.
_DSC4405
_DSC4461
Pacifica-21-20170129.jpg
L1004568-Edit.jpg
