January 18th, 2011
I got home from work around 6am and fell asleep until 2pm. I spent whatever time I had before I had to go off to set again with Jenny and June. It was another overnight shoot on a blocked off street in Hollywood. It was a busy night for me too. I kept reminding myself, I need to do something creative before the day is over.
Before I knew it my cell phone read 5am, almost wrap time. I wrapped my crew at 5:30 and realized I needed to do something quick.
I couldn’t have cut it closer. I have many times on previous days started a creative project well after midnight and still counted it as my creative thing for the previous day but this time I was minutes away from sunrise without anything accomplished. I decided that the apropos thing to do in this situation was to actually document the sunrise.
Since I was in Hollywood I decided to drive up to the lookout point on Mulholland Dr. It’s a beautiful spot to look down on the city lights. I set my camera on the curb and pointed it out towards the skyline. I don’t have an intervalometer for doing time lapse but I do have a remote control for my shutter so I grabbed it. I set the camera to do 1 second exposures and set the mode to continuous. This way I could simply hold down the button on my remote and the camera would continue snapping pictures at one image a second.
I sat there for almost an hour holding that button down. It was kind of a nice way to start a new day. I rarely get to see the sun rise and looking down over Los Angeles as commuters start their days and I end mine was cathartic.
The music in the video below is from an artist called Automatic Thoughts. The song is called “Ohm Sweet home” and it’s from an EP he did called “Keep Right”. You can download it for free, here.
WOW!!!! I think it,s a dream of mine visit that point since i quite obsessed with David Lynch,s film Mulholland Dr.To be in such big city has to be amazing…I live in a village with only 7000 people ;) I didn,t try a timeelapse,yet and yours its beautiful…
ohhh, and “keep right” EP is superb!!!Great,great Noah!
Pretty sweet. Did downtown disappear due to smog or because you kept the aperture steady?
@bite, I’m sure I would find your village of 7000 more pleasant than Los Angeles. I live on the outskirts of LA in the city of Fullerton. I would actually hate to live in LA. I hate driving there. You can’t turn left, or at least you have to wait until the street light turns yellow to finally turn. It’s cool to visit and maybe see a show but living there would no doubt be too much for me. San Francisco though, that’s a nice city to live in. Northern California as a whole is just a beautiful place to be.
@John, Yep eventually I had to keep the iris steady. I closed it down all the way to 22 and with the 1 sec exposure time it eventually blew out. No, not the smog, :)
Just saw this! Thanks for using my tune, Charlie. I’m flattered ;-)
Haha! Glad you got to see it. I wanted to use a track from you sooner but I’m glad I finally got one in.