Fourth of July, or as I like to call it, a photojournalist holy day of obligation… I think I will probably be working every Fourth of July for the foreseeable future.
I shot the Fourth of July fireworks at the San Clemente Pier and I realized that I took lots of silhouettes tonight. These are a few of my favorites:
Pretty self explanatory…
Chelsea and I went camping in Joshua Tree National Park this past weekend and went out for a nighttime photo excursion to try and light a Joshua Tree at night. This is lit entirely with 2 flashlights– one from Chelsea on the right side of the photo and one from me at the front of the photo. Good job teamwork:
Dream assignment — covering beer festivals and breweries. This is Left Coast Brewing Company in San Clemente, CA.
The San Clemente Beer Festival helped raise money for welcome home programs for the Marines down the road at Camp Pendleton, which is never a bad thing either.
Last night, I got to attend a rehearsal for a performance known as the “Pageant of the Masters” in Laguna Beach. In a nutshell, the event uses live actors and life size sets to recreate classic artwork. It is billed as the event where “art comes to life” and it creates what they call “living pictures.” It was cool to go behind the scenes and see how it is all done. Unfortunately though, every single media member within a 100 mile radius of Los Angeles also attended making it a bit cramped in a small makeup room. I think most of my time was spent making sure other cameras/reporters/pseudo-journalists were out of my frame. Either way though, it was a cool event. If you didn’t know better, you would think these paintings were the real thing– without actors placed in them.
And to give you an idea of what the final product looks like, see the images below. Not the coolest-looking images, but they show you how real the paintings look when they are turned around and presented to the audience. Yes, those are real living and breathing human beings in those paintings:
I am not sure I could adequately explain how I ended up in Gloria Fickling’s home yesterday evening but it was certainly random. Basically, we went to the Laguna Beach Art Crawl and Gloria was a friend of a friend. We got to know Gloria or “Glori” during the evening and Chelsea and I ended up giving her a ride home so she didn’t have to walk 10 blocks uphill.
Glori invited us in and we learned her husband wrote a series of novels in the 60’s based on a female James-Bond-like character called “Honey West.” Honey West was one of the first female private eye characters in an era when gun-toting men were always the detective characters in books and movies. As we also learned, Glori’s husband based this character on Glori’s persona. The books spawned a Honey West television series (starring the late Anne Francis) that ran on ABC from 1965-1966 and there are even comic books being made about Glory West today.
Glori took us up to her office which overlooks the entire town of Laguna Beach and it was full of Honey West memorabilia, original book cover art, and all sorts of cool things. While we were up there, I made this picture of Glori– the inspiration for “Honey West.” Glori is about the age of my grandmother, but she was one fun lady to hang out with yesterday (and so is my grandmother!! I know you are reading this…). I am sure we will be seeing more of Glori this summer.
And here is the opening for the Glory West TV show from the 1960’s:
