Venice Beach Photos - a New Ongoing Series (1980 - Unknown)

I've been going to Venice Beach, CA since around 1980.  From 1980 to around 2008, I roller skated Venice to Santa Monica, and sometimes to Redondo Beach and back.  I always carried my camera with me, which until around 2000 or so was a Nikon film camera.  I shot probably thousands of photos.  Don't forget, with film you could shoot B&W or color film.  B&W was less expensive so shot many photos this way, and usually processed and printed my own film.  With digital, there is no difference in cost to shoot in color or B&W, and it is easy to convert color to 50 shades of B&W or more (I know, but I had to make that reference, LOL).  Everything I shoot is now in color as I shoot only digital.

A little more about the transition from film to digital, at least as it relates to my photography.  When I was shooting with film with the Nikon, everything was in manual mode - manual focus, manual exposure, manual ASA (now called ISO) determined by the film you would be using.  The camera did have a built in light meter to verify that the exposure was correct, but sometimes, shooting under rapidly changing conditions and wanting to get the photo, exposures were off.  Sometimes when changing film from one ASA to another, I forgot to set the light meter.  Oops.  There was very little latitude with color film.  If I knew I had made a mistake with B&W, I could somewhat compensate during developing.  That is no longer a problem with digital.  I almost always shoot my walk around images in aperture priority mode with the same ISO, and in RAW mode which gives a bit more latitude than JPG.  With the focus on the Nikon - if I had removed my glasses, the focus might be off.  Or if the subject moved closer or further away.  That problem is also gone for many cameras, although some cameras might have a problem with this.  These days, almost all my exposures are accurate and well focused.  With that said, some of my photos through the year 2000 may not all be perfect, due to the above problems, but I am posting those that I think may be of interest.  Some photos have faded or color shifted with time (another problem gone with digital), and some may have dust spots from the film or the scanning, and with thousands of photos, didn't have time to remove all those spots.  The digital photos will be much cleaner with more accurate colors, too.

Many of the photos have been of movie sets and celebrities at Venice Beach and I will start with those photos here.

With that out of the way, here are the first of the series:

Harry Dean Stanton skating near the old Venice Pavilion and Slalom - probably early 1980s. 

The above three photos are of Playmate Hope Carlton, Photographed during a film being shot at Venice Beach sometime in the 1980s.  The girl getting shot by Hope works at Venice Beach.

The above four photos are of Jana (one with me in it, too) - I met her while doing pictures with Reagan at Venice Beach in the early 1980s.  I used to tell her she should become a model.  I don't know if that's why she became a model, but she became a very successful supermodel regardless and was always a wonderful person.  As you can see from the photo just above, she was a few inches taller than I was.

And finally, I will end this post with Michael Landon.  The bottom photo was shot during a scene they were filming.  The top one was after the filming went on a break and I asked him if I could get a close-up of him.  He said yes, but that he was going to keep walking.  I was skating backward for this shot, which is why the smile on his face.  I don't think he expected that.

Hope you enjoy this series.  Following the movie theme, you will see everyday beach life from around 1980 at Venice Beach.  Many things have changed, many have not.