Ballona Wetlands

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.

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.