Halls of Science

72 Nobel prizes, 15 Turing Awards, discovery of 16 elements on the periodic table (more than any other university in the world... Go Bears!), University of California, Berkeley and Berkeley Labs are collectively a heavy hitter when it comes to scientific discovery, research, and contribution.  And then, of course, there's the California Academy of Science... natural history museum by day, club and bar for the scientifically-minded on Thursday nights with its Nightlife events.  Aside from the nostalgia of revisiting old stomping grounds, I wanted to to capture the exploratory, innovative, and erudite spirit of these places in an image.

This was a tough endeavor since the lighting in both places were harsh.  At Berkeley, it was early afternoon with the sun bearing down and buildings created shadow, which resulted in unwanted shadows.  At the Academy of Science, there was harsh overhead lighting in the rainforest exhibit and no flash photography allowed anywhere.  Not to mention people everywhere in both places... and not helpful crowds blending in the background to add to the scene, but random individuals wearing obnoxiously bright and distracting floral patterns that distracted the eye.

Not as successful as I would have liked, but I still managed to have a great time... of course, the drinks at Nightlife helped with that!!

Looking from North side back towards the Campinile... otherwise known as how engineers see campus.

The lighting of this photo is all off since the background is in bright sunlight and the foreground has the bear statues in the shadow of the building to the right.  Opening the aperture or slowing shutter speed resulted in blown out sky and bears that were in shadow.  I'm not sure this could have been corrected with just the camera given the natural light and short of waiting for the sun to be in the right spot at the right time.  Even with a neutral density filter that would tint the sky and not the ground, the vertical lamppost and the Campanile itself would be exposed incorrectly since they both would cross the neutral density filter line.  Tricky.

Pterodactyl in the Valley Life Sciences Building

Rainforest dome in the California Academy of Science... it was 80 degrees and 80% humidity in there!

Monster of the deep.

Looking up.

More Science

Active Shooting Hours: 1.5
Review Hours: 1
Hours to Date: 124.5

Living the Dream: Industrialists & Philanthropists

Having just watched Baz Luhrmann's ostentatious rendition of The Great Gatsby last weekend, I've had 1920s opulence and leisure on my mind ("A Little Party Never Hurt Nobody" - my current anthem off The Great Gatsby OST) and wanted to photograph somewhere reminiscent of that wealth. 

With that in mind, my friend Niki and I decided to head to the Getty Villa, which sits atop a hill in the Pacific Palisades overlooking the ocean.  Later in the afternoon, we also made an impromptu trip over to the Griffith Observatory just because we felt like it and we could - trademark attitude of the rich and famous?  I can only imagine what kind of lifestyle J. Paul Getty and Griffith J. Griffith rocked given the prime real estate they purchased and then donated along with funding to the city of Los Angeles to create free, public access museums with expensive exhibits.

We kicked off the day as any wealthy industrialist would: with champagne at brunch.  And the whole concept of "great pictures are taken with great technique, not fancy equipment" proved itself to me when I got this shot with my iPhone 4:

Bubbles!!! iPhone 4, with a little color punch from Instagram

And later, while "people watching" (read: waiting for people to get out of my shots) at the Griffith Observatory, I realized that most people take pictures very casually.  They literally have a "point and shoot" mentality without considering what's in their picture, light, color, or other focal points of interest.

Some of these people also seemed to fall prey to the fallacy that expensive cameras will magically make their photos better, given that lots of them were hefting around fancier and pricier DSLRs than mine, but not taking their time, adjusting anything, or moving around to take the photo from a different perspective.  For all of their dropped dollars, their pictures (at least the ones I could glimpse from their LCD screens without being an obvious and awkward creeper) were boring, blurry, and sometimes just awful.

I even experienced some of that in my attempt to capture the observatory's Tesla coil in action:

Despite capturing the awesomeness that is a Tesla coil spitting out some serious voltage, this is a sucky, sucky photo: unintentionally blurry, reflections of people with cameras and the other exhibit sign in the glass, cut off neon letters, and random people in the shot.

Most people would say that I got the Tesla coil doing its thing.  I'm sure a person could show this photo and tell the related story, but after being subjected to an entire album of poorly photographed pictures like this one, any third party observer would be looking for the nearest exit.  It was definitely an important epiphany to have - being aware is the first step in not taking crappy photos.

In any case, 4 hours and some 200+ shots later, I did manage to capture some decent images.

The Getty Villa:

Fountain statues. The eyes creeped me out too.

Niki, in the vine covered breezeway

Columns along the garden

The Griffith Observatory:

From the road, looking up towards the observatory

The Foucault pendulum in the rotunda, 18mm f/3.5 at 1/200s.  Probably my favorite shot of the day... I love the reflection of the lit panels in the metal pendulum - it's reminiscent of a solar eclipse.

Niki, with DTLA behind her.

He may be a rebel without a cause, but he's got Hollywood looking over his shoulder.

The Hollywood Sign, just before sunset.

All in all, a great day at two very iconic and beautiful places in LA.  I even learned some random facts to add to my Jeopardy! trivia knowledge along the way... like the fact that the area in Italy that the word "Etruscan" describes is actually called Etruria - I'd only ever heard of things being described as "Etruscan" without knowing the area.  And the fact that Saturn is currently 800 million miles away, but we still got to see it pretty clearly through a telescope.
 
Hours to Date: 6