Drama 16 Stage Lighting

This picture was taken by me on January 7, 2014 on the 210 freeway headed west.

Sunrise/Sunset

The sunset was very orange, more than I had ever seen, and I remember looking at it and getting excited because we were on our way to LA to see The Lion King at the Pantages Theatre. The sunset reminded me a lot of the sunrise at the beginning of the movie. It filled the sky so there was no color other than the orange and yellow from the sunset. It reflected off all the cars sitting in traffic with us, making it hard to see because everything was so bright.

1) Upload Photo and insert into post.

2) “Spaghetti Junction” – A photo of an interchange in Aukland, New Zealand

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3) THEME: Night Life

4) In Los Angeles, the freeways are the life, the veins of the city.  The 5, the 10, the 210.  605.  57.  710.  134 and 110.  New York might be the city that never sleeps, but Los Angeles is the city that never stops.  Living in the valley, it’s inevitable that you will end up on a freeways if you are traveling more than a couple miles away.  One of the signature features of the tightly knit freeway system is the stack interchanges and spaghetti junctions – weaving layers of offramps and bypasses as 9.8 million people move about their lives. This photo brings me back to those roads.

There is a cleanliness to long exposure photography.   Objects become blurs of motion.  Blurs become streaks, streams.  Anything that isn’t static simply disappears.  Rivers of light flow across the road as hundreds of vehicles flow by while the shutter stays open.  Light becomes the single most important thing in the photo when the cars dissapear.  The city behind glows.  In areas where only a few vehicles pass, there appear to be no cars.  The lanes with the most traffic, on the other hand, are a wash of reds and whites.  Even when reduced to nothing more than their lamps, you can feel the motion of the traffic flowing before you.  Driving out for the night, headed home after work, meeting a wife, an old friend or a blind date—Oh your way there you become just another part of the flow, a streak of light in the night.