Photographers Blog

Los Angeles: Home Sweet Home

Hyungwon Kang

May 4, 2012 20:23 EDT

By Hyungwon Kang

Los Angeles is home to my family.

I grew up in L.A., met and married my wife Daisy in L.A., and the first two of our children were born in L.A. My grandmother’s grave is at the Forest Lawn Cemetery, where the late pop star Michael Jackson is also interred. My mother still lives in her Koreatown home where she maintains an immaculate organic vegetable garden.

As far as I remember, there were always risks to living in L.A. In my 8th grade, three big boys ganged up on me, punching me in the chest and stole my Schwinn BMX bike. In the 1990’s, when I was on the staff of the Los Angeles Times, we all had extra chain-locks to secure our company-issued car trunks, to slow down any would-be robbers.

A day with the LAPD

Lucy Nicholson

Apr 30, 2012 21:22 EDT

By Lucy Nicholson

I held on to my cameras in the passenger seat of an LAPD cruiser as Sergeant Rosendo Gomez sped around the corner to back up officers on a car chase.

Several police stood in the street behind their car doors with their guns pointed at a white minivan.

“Put your hands up where we can see them,” an officer commanded. “Get out of the car. Put your hands behind your head. On your knees. Lie down.”

I edged tentatively towards the scene, not wanting to startle officers whose fingers were on their triggers.

Hollywood royals

Sam Mircovich

Jul 20, 2011 14:54 EDT

Britain’s Prince William and his wife Catherine the Duchess of Cambridge wrapped up their eleven day tour with a stopover in the Los Angeles area. Even though I deal with celebrity coverage on a daily basis and plan major award show coverage for Reuters, when I saw the pool assignment from the British consulate for their trip, it was an uh-oh moment for me.

In Los Angeles, the big 6 photo agency/media companies (LA Times, Reuters, AP, Getty, AFP and EPA) regularly pool images from celebrity trials and other high profile news events where it is not possible for all to cover. We have developed a friendly system that works for all. Half expecting this event to be business as usual, the official pooling plan became a web of complexity we as a group hadn’t dealt with before.

I am an obsessive planner. If I can’t get all the details in order way before the event, I get edgy. In the weeks before the event, information was scarce, the credentialing process difficult, and the unknown loomed larger by the day. Questions like, how many feet from riser to stage? How will we deliver the pool? What are our responsibilities to the UK WPA pool? All went unanswered. In the end I had to learn to relax and not sweat the details and let things play out on their own, because that’s the way this event will operate. Acceptance of what I can’t control became my mantra.

That’s not to say we couldn’t be as prepared as possible. You just have to plan for the unknown. Which included coordinating pool distribution from ourselves and new contributors that were not part of our regular rotation. When the pooling assignments came out the day the royal couple landed, we got together on a conference call to figure out how to produce the event. Reuters senior photographer Mike Blake came up with the idea of using Dropbox.com as a quick way to deliver the images with equality. It worked perfectly.

School on Wheels

Lucy Nicholson

Mar 21, 2011 13:51 EDT

In a corner of Western Avenue Elementary School’s yard, a dozen children excitedly circle Charles Evans at the end of their day.

One child bounces a ball, another picks a handful of play slime out of a jar as the others chirp with enthusiasm.

While other children have gone home for the day, Evans rounds up this group who have no homes. He leads them down the street to South Los Angeles Learning Center, where he runs an after-school program for homeless children.

Almost 13,500 students out of around 680,000 in the LA Unified School District were homeless in the 2009-10 school year, a more than 50% increase from five years ago, due largely to unemployment and foreclosures.

The center run by School on Wheels used to open one day a week, but Evans now collects the kids daily after school for two hours, until their shelters open. The program got its name from the tutors who visit children such as Jayla weekly, in shelters, parks and libraries.

Street photography is like falling in love…

Lucy Nicholson

Apr 12, 2010 14:56 EDT

I was walking in downtown Los Angeles when I saw the two brothers sitting there. They were drinking soda by a hot dog stand. The symmetry struck me – their identical outfits, the two-tone wall they leaned against and the two bottles.

It was after a couple of days photographing Japanese baseball superstar Hideki Matsui’s home opener with the Los Angeles Angels. There were so many Japanese photographers that I had to leave for the stadium six hours before the start of the game in order to reserve the best shooting position.

Matsui-stalking was fun, but no-one gets into photography because they enjoy fighting for shooting positions or carrying heavy camera equipment up flights of stairs.

Walking around downtown with one camera and one lens (Canon 5D Mark II and 50mm f1.2) is much more like it. Street photography is like falling in love with photography all over again.

A couple kisses on a street in South Los Angeles, November 11, 2008. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

It all started a few months ago when I was given a Blackberry with my first camera phone. Suddenly I was able to snap every photo I saw without having to think about choosing a lens, setting the exposure, over-thinking the composition. Capturing decisive moments, it has become my photo sketch pad.