CicLAvia #6, 4/21/13!

 

Sunday, April 21st, was our 5th, but the city of Los Angeles' 6th CicLAvia event, and the first to take people from downtown LA to the beach. Inspired by a similar event in Columbia called Ciclovia, CicLAvia has been an event that happens every few months or so (so far! hopefully more frequently in the future!), where streets of Los Angeles are closed down for a few hours for people to enjoy outside of their cars. Most people bike, but the others walk, skateboard, Rollerblade or scooter along. The routes change, but the heart of the event stays the same in that CicLAvia is: free, open-ended as long as you aren't driving a car and awesome (ok, well that's not a requirement, but you could have fooled me!) And since as usual, I carried my camera on our 18 mile ride, here's some reasons why I love this event:



I've got company! 
As someone who bikes and walks around LA a lot, it's really a great experience to have so many others out there with me. It's even more awesome to feel like you can freely explore the streets without the constant fear of death-by-car since the interactions with cars are fairly limited on the route. It's also awesome to see all the different types of people out there biking together. Yay!

Exploring new Neighborhoods!
It's fun to explore new neighborhoods and see how they are actually connected to the ones you already know. This time we made it from downtown to essentially The Museum of Jurassic Technology - both places I had been before, but never slow enough and directly connected to see the old Victorian houses between. Things move by slower when you're biking, so there's more time to take things in and it's easier to stop and take a look around. Some neighborhoods I've just never really spent time in, others I usually explore alone or at times when it's not really ok to just stand in the middle of the street to take the perfect picture. CicLAvia mixes it up a bit and let's people experience the city in a new way.

It feels like the Playa!
So far, CicLAvia and the playa at Burning Man have been the best biking experiences of my life. Although they don't allow complete abandonment of biking responsibility, they both provide the chance to just enjoy biking in one of those ways where you can sit back and relax.  As a result, in some ways, these events will always be interconnected in my mind. CicLAvia feels like a local version of Burning Man in some ways. Both provide some of the safest biking experiences I've had since I decided to start biking regularly. Both provide a community feel and allow even people like me to feel somewhat friendly about chatting randomly with people around me. Both bring out youthful playfulness and present an opportunity to share creativity. There's even some bikes that show up at CicLAvia that I'm 99.99% sure have graced the playa in the past.

People (and pets) are happy!

CicLAvia's also an awesome way to spend time with people and meet up with friends and it's not uncommon to encounter people randomly sharing, chatting, waving and smiling and generally enjoying both being part of and observing everything going on around them. This is one of the few events that I honestly look forward to and that makes me feel like "LA is doing SOMETHING right! Look at all the happy people!"

The number of people that show up (April 21st is currently estimated at 180,000) and variety of people really shows that there IS demand for this sort of thing. People in LA really do want to be outside, biking and hanging out in the streets where they can feel safe. People will exercise if you give them a good space to do it. People do spend money even if they aren't in a car (it's much easier to find bike parking, stop randomly or look at things when on a bike. We stopped and ate at Native foods,  a vegan restaurant that was pretty packed with a line to the door the entire time we were waiting for our food and eating!)  People really will talk to one another and are generally more pleasant face to face. I often joke with people, making the sound of a car horn and mentioning how weird it would be if people just walked up and honked at one another in the line at the store or when trying to get someone's attention at work. Cars create a weird way of interacting and living.

With all it's awesomeness, there's still some growing pains with the event. The congestion we experienced this time meant we didn't make it out to the beach in Venice nor were we able to meet up with a friend, but it was fun none the less. I also imagined how much WORSE the traffic would have been if the people were in cars with an average of 1.25 people and how much space that would have taken up instead of bikes. It also always feels like there isn't enough time! Five hours never feels long enough. It'd also be nice to have the hours outside of peak sunlight (10am-3pm) on streets without shade and 80+ degree weather - I accidentally missed putting sunscreen on my arms and paid for it.

I look forward to the time when I don't know what number CicLAvia event we're on and I can't say I'm able to go nearly every time because they happen so often. I really recommend, whoever you are, if you're ever in LA, even on a vacation, see if CicLAvia is going on and if so, make time for it. It's one of the best ways to experience LA I've found so far.

alone

This morning, I woke up to the sound of all sorts of birds calling and chirping from all directions. After a trip to the bathroom, I knew I had to wander. I quickly discovered I had the beach to myself, with no other humans, as it was, for 45 minutes. Living in Los Angeles in an apartment, alone time outside is extremely rare and thinking about it now, suffocating at times. It's nice to breathe every now and then.

Refugio State Beach, Goleta, CA

.....more to come.....

unreal women and towering buildings

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Walking in Los Angeles (part 1 of ~ a million!)

walking in Los Angeles.....

Los Angeles River

...this one makes me want to do a whole series of
similar pictures of different truck sides!

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Diana Downtown and around

Although the previous owner of my Diana+ said they had only shot 1 roll of film with it, I was eager to get shooting as soon as I had my hands on it's little plastic body. The very first roll I shot was a color roll given to me by the previous owner (I haven't figured out where to get those developed yet), but the very next one was black and white. After getting out of work early one day,  I stopped in downtown Los Angeles to wander around and shoot. At this point I had already realized what an awesome, every day travel companion this camera would become, perfect for photography during the random bits of free time that sometimes appear.

Los Angeles Grand Central Market

Angels Flight rail

Pueblo de Los Angeles

downtown randomness including a palm, puddle and some of the police station

Los Angeles Union Station

Los Angeles Union Station

Pinhole of not downtown Los Angeles

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Carlsbad Caverns - the second roll, first; yashica mat style

 

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico (click to see larger versions!)

This is one of the black and white rolls I shot with the Yashica Mat 124G, an older Japanese Medium format camera. While scanning these, I was so excited about the results and to revisit the caverns! Over time I've become more fascinated, wondering when someone actually took a medium format camera into the caverns to shoot the beautiful, other worldly structures. I used 400 speed film and managed to do a decent job of stabilizing the camera by using handlebars, seating and breathing to get some pretty clear shots (i.e. no tripod.) Although I really think I should have been ok using this camera (I didn't use the lightmeter in the camera since I haven't been able to get the battery compartment open) while the bats came out at night, the rangers no longer allow cameras or electronics while the bats are flying, which was disappointing (I got some awesome shots of the bats last time I visited ~9 years ago!) I suppose film cameras are so rare now, especially without electronics, that the staff don't really consider it. Next time, I suppose....

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3 little birds

3 little birds, cut from the same bird shape and collaged with different ideas; nearly all collage paper from a single magazine. bright, all human hair, black and white, with brads for wings, so the wings are positionable

Diana Visions 1

Oh joy! Although I've been shooting pretty regularly with my Diana+ camera for the last 4 months, none of the pictures have appeared here. Not because I didn't love the images (well...sometimes my experiments don't work, but that's expected), but because I still haven't managed to pull together the last couple of pieces of an enlarger/darkroom setup and I didn't have an scanner. So trapped on film, the images were only viewed in reverse on improvised lightboxes in my apartment. Then I received an awesome birthday gift of a scanner that will scan film, including medium format, so I've been a scanning worker bee for the last few days and likely will be for a couple more weeks. I'm only through about 3 rolls of film, but I still have at least 10 left (plus some film that hasn't been developed yet!) including some pictures from our trip to New Mexico last year, so there is plenty more of this to come. This first set were shot with the Diana+, an awesome little medium format film plastic toy camera that's extremely light, extremely simple (expose multiple times until your heart's content!), completely manually wound and has the ability to remove the lens and use it as a pinhole camera, which is awesome. I love having this little camera with me all of the time as an alternative opposite to my cell phone!

 

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10 on 10, March 2013

Although I intended on using a different camera for each 10 on 10 , I decided to go with my Olympus E-520 again this month.

my sweet, always moving, impossible to take perfect pictures of, rat : watering some of my air plants (hopefully more to come on these guys at some point) : visiting the farmers market : clear spring morning in Los Angeles : walking around doing errands :  crow captures while walking around  : doing stuff at home : trying to get my sewing machine to work again : preparing for black and white film developing :  film development complete!

3 Salved years

Yesterday made 3 full years of this little rattie nose in my home, bringing much love and amusement.