Category Archives: Categories

9/11 – The Twin Towers

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I’m going to deviate a little from the normal subjects we cover, with the 9th anniversary of 9/11 coming this Saturday, I wanted to commemorate the passing of all those souls that lost their lives that day by featuring a tribute to the buildings that has come to symbolize that terrible event. People in Washington DC or Pennsylvania, may have a different vision for their memories, but to most of the nation and especially to New Yorkers, the World Trade Center showed us how quickly a building and our hearts could crumble.

Sunset reflecting off World Financial Center and Twin Towers

New York Post's one year anniversary of 9/11 issue

As we watched the mortar, steel and concrete disintegrate beneath them, we saw the two buildings fall, but we felt 3000 lives perish. A friend of mine died that day, Captain Pat Brown of the FDNY. The things I knew about Pat were that he was a Vietnam war veteran whose recounts of action were chilling and horrific. He was also the one of the department’s most decorated firefighters, a true hero, serving at Ladder Company 3, which lost 11 members that day. He also studied yoga and gave of his time to teach it to kids. He lived a life of service! When I saw the towers fall, I remember thinking that Pat was in there, I knew it, not out of any psychic reasons, but because that is where he would be, leading the charge up the stairs to rescue others as he had done for most of his life. I was sadly right.

Aerial view of World Financial Center under construction, 1984

Twin Towers with the bronze sculpture "The Sphere", which survived attack and is now on display in Battery Park

I had a twenty-year plus relationship with the Twin Towers themselves, I had photographed them almost from the time they were built. I shot them from the eastside with the Brooklyn Bridge; the westside from Jersey City across the Hudson; towering aerials from above and looking up from below as they touched the sky. When they were built, they were not everyone’s favorite, in fact many thought they were a blight on the classic lower Manhattan skyline, but they grew on us and became an iconic part of the New York cityscape. I think it was Ric Burns who said that after the towers were gone, it was like losing a limb, you keep reaching for it, but it is not there. That was how it felt to me, I didn’t recognize the city loved.

Brooklyn Bridge and Twin Towers

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in the shadow of the Twin Towers

I hope you enjoy looking at these photos that I took over the years, I never got tired of photographing the World Trade Center and skyline, I amassed hundreds of them during that twenty year period. I also had the honor of gracing the New York Post’s ( I know it is not my favorite paper either) 1 year anniversary issue memorializing that tragic day. We are nine years away from that Tuesday, but it is just as haunting and heartbreaking as it was then. It is good to remember, it would be better if we could learn.

Photo illustration of moon and lower Manhattan skyline

Nurdles

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I woke up this morning to the news the California State Senate failed to pass a ban on plastic bags, really sad news and a disgusting example of our government for sale. The havoc these bags cause to our oceans and waterways is devastating to fish, wildlife and ultimately us. Toxins such as Phthalates, that leach from the plastic, as well as pollutants that adhere themselves to the macro plastic particles, get into the food chain as more and more of the fish we eat mistake these macro particles for their food.

Nurdles I found on Seal Beach

A lot of people are aware of the problems with plastic bags, but many may not know that another culprit is a benignly named little bugger called the nurdle. Nurdles are pre-production plastic pellets and resin materials typically under 5mm in diameter, that are used in the production and manufacturing of thousands of the products we use. Over 250 billion pounds of nurdles are shipped each year, and many, many of them fall off of railroad cars and ships, and then find their way to our oceans and beaches.

Captain Charles Moore showint plastic samples he collected in the North Pacific Gyre

Flying fish and plastic samples, including nurdles, collected in the Gyre

It is estimated that about 10% of the litter found on beaches worldwide are nurdles. I roamed a beach in Seal Beach, just south of Long Beach, to find hundreds of them lying around the beach, I can tell you the story is the same on most any other beach you might find yourself beach-combing on. Nurdles are just part of the family of plastic trash that is caught in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre that wash up on our beaches and get ingested by birds and fish. Atolls in the Hawaiian archipelago like Kure and Midway are littered with plastic debris and the carcasses of albatrosses that migrate there and eat the plastic particles, and either suffocate or starve to death. The graphic example of what was found inside the belly of an albatross is courtesy of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, an organization that is doing extraordinary work in the areas of research and education concerning plastic in our oceans.

Albatross carcass from Kure Atoll with plastic debris in stomach. Courtesy of Algalita Marine Research Foundation

There is no easy way to wrap this up I’m afraid, passage of the plastic bag ban would have been a good start. This leaves it up to local cities and towns to institute bans, which has already started to happen in towns like San Francisco and Palo Alto, with other cities like Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach soon to follow. As long as the chemistry and petroleum industry has millions of dollars to spend swaying the votes of our legislators, it will be a long hard fought battle each time.

LA River and skyline

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Continuing with August’s one photo posts, I went out last night to shoot the LA River at sunset, something I have wanted to do for a few weeks. I remembered there was a spot along the bike path where the downtown skyline is visible and I thought that would make a nice juxtaposition with the tranquility of the river. If you saw last weeks photo, you might remember I like my juxtapositions. I picked a spot I thought would work (with the help of Joe Linton), the northern point of a straight stretch of the river that runs parallel with I-5, not far from the LA Zoo.

LA River and skyline

The result was a good photo, but maybe not a great one, I think there is perhaps a little too much juxtaposition in the image, the freeway lights and the wires across the river are things I could do without. But that is the story of the LA River, it fights for its right to breathe and flow amidst all the urban obstacles and barriers that exist in the large metropolis. It flows past train yards and factories; I have seen abandoned cars and more shopping carts than I can count in it as well. But these days there are more parks being built and bike paths extended and they are slowly but surely changing the aesthetic and the utilization of the river.

It also has its secrets! I remembered that I was on a river clean up a few years ago just a bit down river from where this picture was taken. I came upon a young very pregnant woman who had set up a little camp for herself in the middle of a cropping of trees. Her partner was out getting food and whatever else they needed. We spoke for a little while and she was perfectly nice, it was just that they had decided to call this little part of the river their home. Now I always look inside these clumps of trees and bushes and wonder what else might be in there.

Ballona Wetlands

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It’s August and I am slowing down with Summer’s end approaching, so I thought I would just run some one shot posts for a few weeks. I went out last night to shoot the Ballona Wetlands, a beautiful area south of Marina Del Rey and just west of the Playa Vista housing development. For a number of years, and continuing to this day, there has been a battle to save the Ballona Wetlands from further development. The wetlands once extended north to Venice and further inland, and has been slowly built on over the years, the latest foray was the massive housing complex of Playa Vista, which you can see on the right side of the photo. What remains of the wetlands was saved by the acquisition of the land by the state, and the efforts of groups like Friends of  Ballona Wetlands. Wetlands, besides their pristine beauty and home to numerous species of birds and other wildlife, are a very complex eco-system as well as nature’s natural wastewater purification filter. The wetlands are located at the mouth of the Ballona Creek, which was once a natural flowing waterway, but is now a paved channel for rain and wastewater runoff.

Ballona Wetlands and Playa Vista housing development

I wanted to juxtapose the wetlands with the encroaching Playa Vista development. I thought a dusk shot would more dramatically make the point with the lights from the buildings and traffic along Lincoln Blvd., contrasted with the quiet serenity of the wetlands. The problem was that all that quiet serenity was going to be very dark compared to the lights, sky and the setting sun. I used a trick that every printer learns to do when making their B&W prints on an enlarger, a little dodging and burning. In this case, I waved my appointment book with its straight edge up and down, right in front of the top half of my lens while I was exposing the image. The exposure was about 20 seconds and I dodged the book for about 15 seconds, which kept the upper part of the exposure dark and from burning out the sky and mountains too much. A little tweaking in Photoshop didn’t hurt either.

The LA River is a river

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I love the Los Angeles River. I honestly have to say that I wasn’t exactly sure what is was the first few times I saw it, but I found it to be a fascinating place to explore and photograph. On July 8, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told me what it is, something many people had already known, that the LA River is a “traditional navigable water,” in other words, it’s a river.

Glendale Narrows

4th Street and 1st St Bridge, downtown Los Angeles

Jackson made the announcement at Compton Creek, one of the LA Rivers tributaries, to a crowd of applauding supporters. This was a great day for many of the people I know who have worked so hard to bring this day to fruition, among them: Lewis MacAdams, Shelly Backlar, Ramona Marks and Alicia Katano, the folks at, and formerly at FoLAR (Friends of the Los Angeles River); Joe Linton of LA Creek Freak; and George Wolfe, LA’s own Vasco de Gama, who led a three day kayak expedition in 2008 down the length of the 51 mile long river, to prove that it was indeed navigable. He succeeded, not only in completing the trip, but by proving to the Army Corp of Engineers that the river was deserving of the term and the protection it afforded under the Clean Water Protection Act. Now the EPA has made it official. This will mean cleaner water in the river and higher restrictions for development along and near the river’s banks.

Start of the the 2008 LA River Expedition at the Sepulveda Basin

The day I started to understand how beautiful and complicated the LA River was, was during a tour of it sponsored by FoLAR and led by naturalist Jenny Price. We started off at the Sepulveda Basin, one of two stretches of the river that is still soft bottomed, just North of the Sepulveda Dam. I stood on the river’s edge and looked up river and saw nothing but lush green growth lining its banks, and ducks, egrets, stilts and other waterfowl seemed to be everywhere. This was not the cement lined flood channel that I had seen in movies or from above when flying in and out of LAX. This looked like a river.

Black -necked Stilt (Himantopus mexicanus)

A Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias)

I also saw for the first time, the ubiquitous plastic bags that I would get to know so well. They were hanging from trees, leftover from past rains and rising waters, some fluttering in the wind like tattered flags, others knotted up in thick plastic balls that looked permanently adhered to whatever tree limb they had formed around. A sad juxtaposition to natural beauty I had just discovered.

Plastic bags accumulate in trees and shrubs along the LA River

Waterfowl in LA River, south of downtown

That same morning would be the first time I saw a boat go down the river as well. Emerging from the up river greenery came a small yellow ocean kayak that then beached itself on the river bank. George Wolfe, the aforementioned leader of the LA River expedition,  popped out and joined our merry tour to give us a brief talk about boating on the river. George would later ask me to help photograph the 2008 expedition, something I was able to do for about a day and a half before succumbing to a dastardly flu that sidelined me quite definitively for the weekend. I have always regretted not following the whole trip, but I was able to witness a bit of history being made and the beginning of some new found respect and recognition for the LA River.

George Wolfe running rapids at the Glendale Narrows

I grew up in lower Manhattan, and spent much of my youth playing along the banks and piers of the Hudson River. The Hudson back then was viewed as a disgusting, toxic brew that you wouldn’t consider getting close to, let alone swimming in. Years later, through the efforts of many, the river was cleaned up quite remarkably. I had the chance to noodle around in a kayak off the Canal Street Pier one day, and as I bounced along with the small waves around me, I realized that I had never actually been that close to the River. I was even getting wet, something that would have required a major decontamination years earlier. I loved it, and that experience enabled me to see the Hudson as a real river. I hope that the new classification of the LA River allows others to have that same awakening, and that we can all start to not only appreciate the beauty of the river, but to get in it and enjoy it as well.