This sign belongs to the oldest still-operating McDonald’s restaurant, located in Downey, CA. I think I’ve kind of become numbed to just how impressive this thing is after living next to it for so many years. It’s too bad it’s been a while since everything on the sign worked properly.
I showed up to do this “magic hour” shot about 10 minutes too late. I wanted to get better balance between the neon lights and the sky light so that the neon wouldn’t be so blown out overexposed. And it would have been nice to have retained some detail in the moon up there instead of having it turn into a burned out white spot. Just a couple of minutes makes all the difference! Oh well. It wasn’t exactly the most amazing sunset today anyway. I’ll try again a different day.
Part of the cool animated sign at the old McDonald’s stand in Downey, CA, a location so old that it actually predates Ray Kroc’s involvement with the company. Not a very good pic today, I shot it lazily from inside my car and it’s not even in focus. Oh well, one pic a day, good or bad, right?
I should get better pics of this later since I live right next to it. Although I did also shoot the picture that’s on wikipedia — but I’ve been wanting to improve on it with a nice “magic hour” shot. And it’s not like I haven’t had plenty of opportunities.
I also have this clip of this sign in motion which was originally shot on Super 16mm a few years back when it was in good working order:
Whenever I see the “500″ it always makes me feel like I’m inside of an episode of the Price is Right or something.
Pioneer chicken locations have all but disappeared but there are still a couple around, like this one at Florence and Garfield in Bell Gardens that I frequent. Let me tell you, I love fried chicken with a passion and there is no crispy, crunchy, juicy, delicious fried chicken skin like Pioneer. The secret is the artery-clogging fat they fry it in, one of the last bastions of the old way of doing things before anybody heard of trans fats or “good cholesterol”
So tonight I went to an outdoor screening of two short films, one of which happened to be the first public screening of “Middle of Nowhere” which I shot with director and old classmate Michael Carreño almost a year ago. And it happened to take place at Space 15 Twenty adjacent to Umami Burger right across from the good old L.A. Film School.
This was the tastiest burger I’ve ever eaten in my life, and that is saying a lot considering how many hamburgers I’ve eaten in my life (what can I say, burgers are my favorite food!) — I highly recommend it to all burger connoisseurs.
It was great to reconnect with all the actors and crew and also the space — I hadn’t actually been to Space 15 Twenty since it was just a bunch of old run down warehouses where we shot a lot of After Midnight. Back then it was dirty and full of homeless poo… now it’s full of hipsters, haha.
