My former Boss/Mentor, Cheryl Younger is premiering her movie All I can Hear Are the Sirens, this Sunday. It is an account of 9/11 through the perspective of New Yorkers at the time, including her and her family and friends.  I have seen it, and it's very powerful and moving. I would  recommend seeing it if you are in the Downtown Los Angeles area.

Please join us for the premiere of my movie All I Can Hear Are the Sirens on Sunday September 11 at 2 PM at the Downtown Independent Theater, 251 S. Main.   There will be a reception that follows at Apartment #502, 108 W. 2nd Street  (just next door). Admission is Free.

Cheryl Younger and Allan Harris

Cheryl:   (212) 203 9645

 Check out my about.me profile!

I always thought about how awesome it would be to own my own place. and it is, only I thought it would be in L.A or Long Beach, or Hollywood, lol. But I'm glad to be here in TX for now, decorating a new place was an experience into itself.

I got this Polaroid for 7 bucks!! Not a bad start to the new town!

This was a little building in Denton, TX that I thought had a interesting quality.

Music and Science Building at Texas Women's University.

Images of the Watts Towers Shoot I did today.

This weekend I did another photo shoot for LA RAWWater Magazine. The theme for this photo shoot was past summers/nostalgia. So I wanted to give everything a yesteryear feel. It was a fun shoot, and i had a good time working with the models, Morgan and Olivia.

photo courtesy of liam-stock

Used my day off to work on some surreal images. This one in particular is a re-edit. I'll post the other one later to compare.

Outtake from the Hell Hath No Fury Concert. The lighting in this image is what I'm drawn to the most.

Candid of a experimental blogger who shoots infrared with a digital camera, which is pretty awesome. This was taken at the Arte En Junio Event, so I didn't get a chance to get his name.

All Images © 2011 L.Tyson

The Beauty Lounge
Presents

“Arte en Junio”

Selected works of Art Photography by: Anthony Castro


Curated By:

Joseph Rene


Musical performance by Gerardo Morales


Artist Reception

Saturday, June 18th 2011

6pm – 10pm

39 North Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena CA


The Beauty Lounge recognizes that the Arts are essential for the cultural, educational, social and economic development of California. Recent State budget cuts have made it difficult for community artist to display work. The Beauty Lounge wants to be the first to encourage commercial businesses to integrate itself with local artist for the benefit of business and art.


thesaltypoet.blogspot.com
tbl-thebeautylounge.com

Another pic from my explorations in Los Angeles.

I accompanied my friend Anthony to a meeting last week, and afterwords we found all these cool locations to shoot, some of them scarier than others, but nothing I couldn't handle. It was just fun to explore and to take pictures; something we hadn't done together in a while.

photo courtesy of telegram @ stockxchange

My attempt at making a tilt-shift image using Photoshop, since the real lenses are out of my budget range, lol . I also really love images of London, and is one of the places I really look forward to visiting.

This was my first year attending the Long beach Pride Festival. It was good to be a supporter for LGBT rights. There were also some christian activists there; which I didn't quite get. I guess everyone needs a hobby. One guy proceeded to yell at me about my so called "sin" I proceeded to explain that I am not a lesbian; but I support equality for everyone. So I wanted to post a image promoting the positive and not the negativity of hatred and judgmental attitudes.

©2011 Kevin Llewellyn

Wonderland Gallery is a brand new venture by famed tattoo artist Kat Von D. Founded in 2010, Wonderland seeks to bring the art of outsiders, romantics and rebels to its West Hollywood locale. By mixing generations, time periods, fashion, and the rock world, we endeavor to create a new experience for the viewer. It is art you’ve never seen before that nevertheless has a familiar feeling to it. -Wonderland LA's Mission Statement.

Their current exhibition is "The Unsaid" featuring artist Kevin Llewellyn, you can find artist bio and gallery info here.

I love anything dark, mysterious, and from an outsiders perspective, so I'm planning on visiting Wonderland LA soon.

A portrait I took of Anthony back in 2009. I still like it.

This image is from a series I did in 2009 when I was studying experimental photography. The series was presented as an installation. The inst won 2nd place Alternative Proceses in 2010 LBCC Photofest. It's one of my favorite to date. It needed a shining moment on the blog.

Late last week I went to Revolver Magazine's kickoff concert for the Hell Hath No Fury Tour. There were 5 amazing bands that played, including In This Moment, and my new favorite band, Straight Line Stitch. All of the band are fronted by women, which is very inspiring. I went with one of my best friends, and we needed that jolt of electricity you get from being at a hard rock/heavy metal show. It just reminded me why I love that type of music. Naturally, I had to take some photos.

It's Easter, and tonight I was asked to retouch some images by a fellow photographer, Rachel Wright. I love pin up photography, so I was happy to do it. This is my favorite image I edited.

I recently did my very first album cover art; it was designed for an up and coming artist, Flash. it was inspired by Frank Miller's The Spirit. I really like the idea of incorporating text into just about any image. Also it allowed me to attempt to use Illustrator, which is another beast all together.

Portrait of a artist from Marina Del Rey, 2011

I recently got a holga lens for my Canon 7D. The lens is plastic just like the holga lens, its just modified to fit on a digital camera. People keep asking me why I would buy a expensive camera just to put a 20 dollar lens on it. To them I say because I can.

I am still in a tutorial mode from doing the workshop yesterday, So I will give a breakdown of how I created my surreal self portrait. I am not going to go into detail on how I edited the images in Photoshop, but more so on how I took each image for the composite.


The first thing I did was photograph the broken mannequin head. I originally had another type of table for the surface, but I'm glad I chose the wooden surface. It adds texture and like the mannequin and me-- it's not perfect.

The next step that I took was to photograph myself for the face of the mannequin. I had my assistant for that day help me with this step. The metal bar in the lower right of the image was a marker to help me know where to align my body so my face would match up with the mannequin head.I realized I had to take a second picture of myself to get my lips and the mannequins to match correctly. Since the first image was shot at a different angle, I couldn't use the lips from that portrait because the mannequins lips are laying against the table.

So I had to align my face at the same angle as the table. The bar to the right was my guide to where I should be so the lips would line up.

From there I took these three images and composted them to get the final image. Which I will repost down here to avoid scrolling all the way back up.

Photo © LaToya Tyson 2011

Today I did a workshop for Photofest @ LBCC and I featured a couple of videos explaining how layers work, and how actions work, and a demo of the high pass retouching method. So here are the links.

Creating Actions


How adjustment Layers/Layer Masks work


Digital Workshop PDF

Workshop Handout