Area Closed, 2011

Crystal Cove State Park is located on the Pacific Coast between Laguna Beach and Newport Beach. In the late 1930s, the Irvine Company controlled the property and limited its development to the current 46 cottages. In 1979, the Irvine Company sold the land to the State of California. Today, some cottages have been restored by California State Parks; others are in an advanced state of neglect and decay and are prominently marked "Area Closed". For more information on the Park see Wiki.

We visited Crystal Cove in 2011 and photographed the run-down cottages. From the same tripod position, I photographed several of the cottages with two cameras: a Hasselblad H4D-60 digital camera, and a Holga, all-plastic camera using 120-format B&W film.

With the Hasselblad, I used the high-dynamic range (“HDR”) method that combines images at multiple exposures to show detail in both the shadows and in the highlights. The result is the color photographs shown here.

With the Holga, I shot with "old-fashioned" B&W film and developed the resulting images in the darkroom. The B&W prints shown here are digital scans of the "contact prints" made by shining light through the negatives onto photographic paper. The "image circle" of the crude Holga, plastic camera can be seen within the square frame of the small contact prints.

I find the Holga prints are more "artistic," the Hasselblad images more "documentary." Each image form conveys its own, unique message to the viewer.