Valley at Night

During the early days of the pandemic, I found myself trying to come up with new concepts to shoot without having to venture out of the valley (San Fernando Valley, to be more specific). And to be honest, shooting in the valley can be pretty challenging…. It wasn’t til’ I picked up a film camera that I truly began to appreciate suburban photography. But, I felt that I had already done plenty of suburban shooting in the valley during daytime.

I follow a few film Instagramers/YouTubers, And Willem Verbeeck is someone whose work I’ve followed for quite some time. His nighttime photography is pretty insane, and he does it with a huge Mamiya RZ67… I have a Pentax 67, so I figured I’d do something similar but based in the Valley. I had never done nighttime film photos, so I was pretty enthusiastic about shooting at night. I bought a shutter release cable and some CineStill 800D (duh) to make the photos more dramatic, and dug up a busted tripod I hadn’t used in years. I was so stoked about shooting at night, I even considered doing a zine on this concept…. But, after going out a few times, I realized it was a lot of fucking work.

I had done some landscape nighttime photography when I first started doing photography a while back (let’s be honest, that’s what all LA photographers do when they first start out). But film photography at night is a different ballgame. There’s a lot more precision, and more planning to it. Setting up for each shot was just too time consuming… Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a dope process, and I’m gonna continue to do it occasionally, but I just didn’t enjoy it enough to pursue it as a project.

Don’t worry people. I’m currently working on a few projects, but you might have to wait a few years. We’ll see. Anyway, here are some photos of my “Valley at Night” series.