Drive 2007 - Day 04 - Drives - Beneath the Waves

Drive 2007 - Day 04

article and photographs by Ben Lincoln

I began the fourth day of this trip by driving to Malibu Creek State Park, which sits just inland of Malibu on the coast. This State Park is quite large, but my exploration of it was limited due to my not being accustomed to the heat. Carrying my photography gear around, I reached about half a mile from the parking lot before I'd used up the water in my backpack and was out of energy. Sitting on one of the hills, I saw a woman running (for exercise) on one of the dirt paths, so it really must just be a matter of acclimatization.

Like virtually every area in Los Angeles County, Malibu Creek has appeared in numerous films. Supposedly some of them were well-known, quality productions, but I mostly recognize it from the sort of low-budget terrible action movies that my friend Uncle Jack (Not his real name^[1]) got me into collecting.

Malibu Creek State Park 1

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Tinted NIR

Tinted UVA

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G-B-UVA

NIR-RGB-UVA

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NIR-B-UVA

NIR Luma / RGB Colour

NIR Luma / Tinted UVA Colour

Inverted NIR Luma / RGB Colour

Inverted NIR Luma / Tinted UVA Colour

A 2-shot panorama of a hillside in Malibu Creek State Park. I've included a couple of extra false-colour images I did as an experiment using a negative of the NIR version as the luminance component. Some things tend to look inverted in the near infrared, so I thought using a negative might make it look more natural to our eyes. It looks very synthetic instead, but I thought they were interesting enough to present along with the rest.

Date Shot: 2007-09-03
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: LDP Net CC1 (RGB), B&W 093 (NIR), Baader U-Filter (UVA)
Date Processed: 2009-02-21
Version: 2.0

Malibu Creek State Park 2

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Tinted NIR

Tinted UVA

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NIR-RGB-UVA

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NIR Luma / RGB Colour

NIR Luma / Tinted UVA Colour

UVA Luma / Inverted RGB Colour

RGB With 'Max Difference' Overlay

A wide (4-shot) panorama looking down at one of the nicer parts of Malibu Creek State Park from a hill. This is one of the few panoramas I've made that actually makes me feel like it captured the feeling of a place successfully. The visible-light version of this one is exactly how I remember Malibu Creek. Like the previous shot, I've included two experimental processed images. The first uses a negative of the RGB version as the colour over the UVA version as luminance. It's not very useful in terms of conveying information, but I liked that it looked like an alien landscape straight out of a Sega Genesis game circa 1990. The "max difference" version is a bit more complicated. I took all five colour channels and generated a greyscale image that represented the greatest variation from the average of the five. This was then overlaid on the RGB version to create a synthetic high-contrast image. My idea here was to do a proof-of-concept for a (realtime) system that would create high-contrast imagery that would still be more or less the colours expected by a normal person. I think the result is interesting, and contrast is certainly improved in some areas, but suffers in others.

Malibu State Park 3

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Tinted NIR

Tinted UVA

NIR-R-G

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G-B-UVA

NIR-RGB-UVA

A 3-shot panorama of a different hill at Malibu State Park. From this angle, you may recognize the area as having appeared on-screen numerous times over the years.

Date Shot: 2007-09-03
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 100mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-02-22
Version: 2.0

After Malibu Creek, I headed along the coast to Santa Monica. This small section of the coast is one of the most pleasant inhabited areas I've ever seen. The skies are clear and sunny, but the temperature is moderated by the ocean, which also provides some great beaches (with real ocean waves, which we don't get back home on Puget Sound, and water that is comfortably cool as opposed to hypothermia-inducingly cold). It can be a bit crowded, but that's understandable given how nice it is. I didn't get any photos that do a good job of capturing the area as a whole, but I did take a few snapshots.

Santa Monica Near the Beach

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Just a couple of handheld shots from a hill in or near Santa Monica to give people who haven't been there a feel for the area.

Date Shot: 2007-09-03
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: LDP CC1
Date Processed: 2007-11-17
Version: 1.0

Erosion Pattern in a Santa Monica Hill

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Tinted NIR

Tinted UVA

NIR-R-G

G-B-UVA

NIR-RGB-UVA

This was a strange (to me at least) pattern of erosion in the hill where I took the handheld shots (above).

Date Shot: 2007-09-03
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-02-26
Version: 2.0

My next stop was the Hollywood Hills. If you are planning on visiting this area, do yourself a huge favour and consult an up-to-date map and the current information for any specific sights you'll be attempting to see. It's dead simple to get to the base of these hills, but getting to the top can be a shockingly difficult task, as I discovered. My Streets and Trips map showed plenty of through roads, but in reality all of these are gated shut to prevent the sort of touristy driving I was attempting (or at least they were during my visit). You will also see numerous "no access to Hollywood sign!"-type notices. In all fairness, this is a heavily-populated suburb with narrow, winding streets, and I can understand that the locals don't appreciate hordes of visitors. However, it would have been very helpful if there had been even one road that was designated "for tourists" and which signs would tell visitors how to reach instead of simply telling them that the one they were currently on was the wrong one.

I did finally manage to get to one of the hilltops, and shot a panorama from a park there. Parks in this part of LA have signs warning of rattlesnakes, although I didn't see any traces of them and have no idea how frequently they're actually encountered.

Hollywood Hills

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Tinted NIR

Tinted UVA

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NIR-RGB-UVA

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NIR Luma / RGB Colour

NIR Luma / Tinted UVA Colour

A very wide (6-shot) panorama from Runyon Canyon Park on top of one of the Hollywood Hills. One of the interesting things to note (most visible in the G-B-UVA and R-B-UVA versions) is how many of the homes are painted with something that absorbs ultraviolet light (the yellow tint is because they reflect whatever is represented by the red and green channels). I suspect this is why so many human-made objects tend to fade or yellow when left out in the sun, but not when indoors. This is not exclusive to Los Angeles - nearly all artificial structures exhibit the same effect. I wouldn't be surprised if military organizations used UVA photography to detect camoflauged buildings, because they stand right out in false colour.

Date Shot: 2007-09-03
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-02-28
Version: 2.0

Downtown LA Skyline 1

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Tinted NIR

Tinted UVA

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G-B-UVA

NIR-RGB-UVA

NIR Luma / RGB Colour

NIR Luma / UVA Colour

With the power of multispectral photography, we can restore the ever-present haze of the 80s to shots of downtown LA. I joke, of course. The haze in this case is due (mostly) to the atmosphere itself, compounded by LA being at sea level (where, of course, the atmosphere is thickest). This is why the NIR version of the shot is virtually haze-free - near infrared scatters less than visible light does in Earth's atmosphere.

Date Shot: 2007-09-03
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Nikon Series E 28mm
Filters: Standard Set
Date Processed: 2009-02-28
Version: 2.0

One of the main reasons I had come to the Hollywood Hills was that I wanted to visit Griffith Observatory. Besides being a famous observatory with lots of astronomy-related information for people like me, it's also an iconic location that's been used in films such as The Terminator (where Arnold Schwarzenegger encounters Bill Paxton as a blue-haired punk), and The Rocketeer. I had most recently seen it in the first live-action Transformers movie. It had been closed from 2002-2007 for an extensive renovation, and unfortunately the city had come up with a terrible (in hindsight, comically so) plan for handling the increased traffic (under pressure, no doubt, from the people who decided to live near Griffith Observatory but didn't want to deal with the traffic hassles that being in that area entails).

Griffith Observatory is free to enter, as stipulated by the will of Griffith J. Griffith, who originally funded the Observatory. Perhaps in order to create some feeling of symmetry with Mr. Griffith's blemished history, Los Angeles devised a plan where the Observatory was still free to enter as long as you could get to it. For the first twelve months after it reopened, there was no public road which led to Griffith Observatory. Visitors were required to either hike uphill through Griffith Park, or make paid reservations to take a shuttle from near the Los Angeles Zoo. As I did not know this until I had spent several hours driving around the hill it was on, trying to find an area that wasn't gated shut, and finally in the parking lot of lower Griffith Park found a sign that explained the situation. By this time, it was too late to make a reservation. At first I attempted the hike alternative, but carrying 30+ pounds of camera equipment uphill for several miles in the heat was not a realistic option. Some day I'll make another trip to LA, and Griffith Observatory is near the top of my list to see.

Heading back to the Motel 6, I decided I should take a couple of pictures of the Los Angeles River to illustrate it for those who haven't seen it, or who have seen it in films but don't know what it actually is. It actually began as a natural river, but was walled in concrete by the Army Corps of Engineers as a flood-control measure. There's an informative writeup with many more photos over at Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures if you're interested. I personally think the LA River is a unique quirk worthy of preservation, but then again I've always been a big fan of angular concrete construction that almost everyone else hates.

The LA River

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You've probably seen the LA River a thousand times in films even if you don't know what it is.

Date Shot: 2007-09-03
Camera Body: Nikon D70 (Modified)
Lens: Sigma 20-200mm
Filters: LDP CC1
Date Processed: 2007-11-17
Version: 1.0

Date: 3 September 2007
Starting Mileage: Unknown, see Drive 2007 - Day 05
Ending Mileage: Unknown, see Drive 2007 - Day 05
Distance Travelled (Day): Unknown, see Drive 2007 - Day 05
Distance Travelled (Trip): 1348+ miles
Gallons of Fuel Purchased (Day): 0
Gallons of Fuel Purchased (Trip): 40.9

There's no map image for today because I didn't want to go to the trouble of setting up my laptop in my car, then transferring it to my trunk every time I parked, then getting it back out afterward repeatedly while I was in LA. If you look at a map of this area, it's pretty easy to follow along.

Footnotes

1.	AKA Legion, Raw Garbage, Tom Vomit, etc.