The Passionate Photographer

This morning's Los Angeles Times ran an interesting article in Column One about Martin Schall, a German oil and gas engineer who has made yearly visits to Los Angeles for the past 11 years to photograph the architecture of the city. His website displays many of the images he has taken and he's gained a certain celebrity for his work. While professional architectural photographers would use large-format ( 4 x 5 or 8 x 10) view cameras, Shall's work is done on a 35mm equivalent digital camera (I assume the earlier work was shot on film) with what looks like wide angle lenses. Thanks to Photoshop, the tilts and swings of a view camera can be replicated in adjustments to small-format images and the photographs do not suffer from the kind of distortion (buildings falling backward, for example) that are often seen in 35mm architecture.

This article is a prime example of a photographer whose passion drives him on this very personal look at the city of Los Angeles. While he may not have intended to do anything more than make pictures he enjoys, the website has brought him all kinds of attention and opened other doors to him.