Photographing Graffiti Art in Los Angeles

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Mary and I had a delightfully quintessential LA experience touring the Arts District seeing and photographing street art.  Here’s how to do it.

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There’s a lot of distracting stuff around like cars, people, trees, and fences.  You do the best you can to isolate the art work.

LA Art Tours gives several different tours in and around Los Angeles.  Take a look.  We went on the Graffiti and Mural Tour.  It’s about 3 hours long and a two mile walk around the Arts District.

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Our guide was Hector Calderon who’s street artist name is Shandu 1.  He has been making street art in LA for many years and knows most of the artists and the history of all the work he showed us.

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Here’s Hector telling Mary an interesting anecdote

Yes, we could have parked in the Arts District and walked around and seen the same murals and graffiti art that we did, but without Hector’s story telling and interpretation, it would not have been even close to the same experience.

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Interactive Art

We used our Fuji XT-1’s and 18-135 mm zoom lenses.  This is our go-to lens for walking around urban settings.  It was pretty bright and the lens has image stabilization, so no fear of blurry photos.  I also shot at the most wide open aperture I could as dept of field was not an issue.

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After the tour, have lunch or dinner in one of the many interesting and cool restaurants in the neighborhood.

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Our group in a parking lot.  All the walls were covered in art.

If you live in the LA area or are in town visiting, this is a great way to learn something new about LA and see some of the best street art anywhere.

To see more of (and buy) our photographs, please go to www.pamphotography.com.

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