“Archways” Commissioned Public Art by Mark Grieve & Ilana Spector – Selected Sculpture for City of Santa Clarita, California

It’s always fun to catch up with dear friends so when artist Mark Grieve and his crew came down from the Bay Area to install his latest public art piece “Archways” for the City of Santa Clarita, I jumped at the chance to catch up and take this photo sphere.

Mark (featured above) had just completed the project and was giving it a fond “goodbye” hug before heading back home.

“Archways” was awarded to Grieve and his partner Ilana Spector as a Selected Sculpture for the City of Santa Clarita and installed at the McBean Transit Center.

Due to construction, the pedestrian sidewalk from McBean Parkway into the McBean Transit Center is closed and will remain in effect until further notice.

Earlier this summer, Google Maps launched a product called “Views” — a global photographer community featuring some of the best panoramic photos worldwide. Google calls these images “photo spheres”, their new and catchy phrase for panoramic photos. This new product really seems to support the Google brand as most of the images I’ve seen were taken with Android devices. However, for panographers such as myself that take higher quality images on a DSLR, Google has provided a workaround solution so that I can share my photos as well.

So far my social experience on Views has been utterly delightful. I’ve met so many other panographers around the world and when I view their work, it’s like a heightened form of armchair travel.

However one thing I’ve noticed is that (at least to me) photo spheres appear better on the Chrome browser rather than my default Safari and I’m not sure quite why.  Could it be a frenemy thing? I don’t know for sure but my best guess is “yes”. So if you’re viewing a photo sphere on your Mac laptop or desktop, I recommend using the Chrome or Firefox browser for an optimum viewing experience.

Above is an image of Universal Studios Hollywood that was taken in the winter of last year. Universal Studios is one of the oldest and most famous Hollywood movie studios still in use. It was also one of the first to offer tours to the public of the real sound stages and sets.

Universal is noteworthy in my family history as my late father got his “break” in Hollywood as a set designer on the original Battlestar Gallactica which was the first of many productions for him at the studios. He went on to be a respected art director in Tim Burton’s Big Fish. It’s also worth mentioning I spent a summer as a tour guide there during my teens and it was so much fun.

Update March 2016: This post originally featured a virtual tour of Universal Studios City Walk using the embed codes of Google Maps Views. The embeds no longer work and are considered “mix content” for Bloggers’ latest security update “HTTPS”. This basically means the two Google products don’t work well together. So I’ve updated this post to reflect a working solution.

Built and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1942, the Sepulveda Dam has been used for locations for countless films and commercials including “Escape From New York”, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” and most recently “Gattaca”, “Bones” and “Iron Man II”.  Last year the Deadmau5 music video “Professional Griefers” was lensed here.

Today the dam is part of the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Refuge.  In December 2012, on the other side of the spillway featured in this image, the Army Corps of Engineers clear-cut an estimated 80 acres of what some say were mostly native shrubs — and homes for many local and migratory birds. Environmentalists say the damage was done in excess of posted plans, and without opportunity for public input. But the Corps says it was necessary to help police an area known for homeless camps and lewd behavior.

While taking images on this side of the spillway I observed a group of teenage boys and girls sliding down the sides of the concrete embankment on folded chairs while others circled around on skateboards carrying torches of burning branches presumably found on the river banks. These adolescents were generally friendly but they seemed to be in an altered state.  I didn’t stay much longer after dark for fear of my personal safety and the remoteness of the location.

It is my intention to “shoot the truth” in my panoramas, that is to say WYSIWYG. However in this instance, I photoshopped out and removed a huge painted phallus on the side wall here only because it was in poor taste plus it was an incredibly bad artistic rendering (if you could even call it art).  Since minors visit this blog and the social networks in which my panoramas are featured, I felt this censorship was necessary.

Additional images of the Sepulveda Dam in 360 can be viewed here and here.

Within the Manzanar National Historic Site is the Manzanar Cemetery. 71 years ago today Manzanar was the first of ten “relocation centers” built by the War Relocation Authority as ordered by Franklin D. Roosevelt following the attacks at Pearl Harbor. The order resulted in the forced relocation of over 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens.  They were deprived of their liberty and property without due process of law.

Over the next three years, 140 prisoners died at Manzanar, most were sent home for burial but 15 were buried there. The six existing sets of remains in Manzanar cemetery are: Three adult males in their early 60’s Matsunosuke Murakami, Minoru Kihara, Shinnojo Fukumoto, and two infants Noriyuki Arasuna, Midori Susan Furuya, and an unnamed stillborn infant in an unmarked grave.

In 1943 internee and Master stonemason for the Los Angeles Catholic diocese Ryozo Kado, along with block 9 residents and members of the Buddhist Young Peoples organization, constructed the Cemetery Memorial obelisk. The inscriptions on the monument were written by Manzanar’s Buddhist minister Rev. Shinjo Nagatomi. The three characters featured in this panorama translate as “soul consoling tower”.

Over a hundred and forty years ago, the Great Lone Pine earthquake struck on March 26, 1872. Historical evidence detailing the damage it caused in settlements and landforms near the epicenter, and the geographic extent to which noticeable movement was felt, leads researchers to estimate a Richter magnitude of 7.6 to 8 or greater — similar in size to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Most buildings in Lone Pine were made from adobe brick and crumbled to the ground. Twenty-seven of the approximately 250-300 residents of Lone Pine were killed. Interred within a fenced enclosure are the bodies of 16 people who lost their lives that day.

This blog post marks a return to the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar, California.  The collection features rare collectibles ranging from mechanical musical instruments and antique furniture to the true heart of the collection: over 250 American and European automobiles dating from 1898 to 1997.  To view a panorama from my previous visit to the Nethercutt and the interior of a 1937 Pierce Arrow trailer, click here.

The wonderful thing about the Nethercutt is that photography is permitted however on some days tripods and monopods are OK while on other days it is not. I think it depends on the security team but it’s worth calling ahead before visiting.

This panorama was particulary difficult to capture with tricky lighting and reflections everywhere. Marble columns, crystal chandeliers, painted ceilings all make up this beautiful Grand Salon Showroom of the 1910’s, 20s and 30s. On display are approximately 30 of the finest automoblies of that era. Duesenbergs, Cadillacs, Isotta-Fraschini, Delahaye, Minvera, Renault, Maybach, many other European and American built automobiles.