u/penumbrapictures

Years ago, actress Maya Parish produced and starred in a play and she asked me to direct.

Before we really got into rehearsals, I asked if I could photograph her. Partly because I wanted the portraits, partly because taking someone’s picture has always been one of the ways I figure out who they are.

At the time I was still pretty new to lighting. I had a basic digital DSLR that I never particularly loved, and an old Mamiya 7II I’d picked up on the cheap about a decade earlier and mostly treated like something too precious to use unless the occasion felt worthy.

So I shot both.

The digital files were fine. The Mamiya frames are the ones I still care about.

There’s something about the texture, the tonal range, the slight imperfections, even the way the camera forced me to slow down, that made these feel more like her and less like a “portrait session.”

Years later, they still feel timeless to me, and they remain some of my favorite portraits I’ve ever made.

Funny how often the camera you almost leave in the bag ends up making the photographs that outlive everything else.

I took these on a trip with my wife and daughter when she was still tiny.

At the time, they were just photographs from a family vacation. Looking at them now, they feel like something else, something more. Kids grow up so absurdly fast that you don’t always realize you’re photographing a version of your life that’s already disappearing.

That’s one of the things I still love about shooting medium format. The Mamiya slows me down enough to really look, and there’s something about the detail, tonality, and depth of those negatives that makes old memories feel unusually present when I come back to them years later.

Very glad I lugged that camera to the beach.

Maybe I’m stubborn.

For the last couple years the conversation around filmmaking in Los Angeles has been relentlessly bleak. The strikes, fires, production leaving, crews out of work, studios chasing incentives somewhere else. Now we’re reading headlines about major Hollywood companies potentially packing up and moving out of California altogether.

I understand the economics. I just don’t particularly care anymore.

I’m producing a small independent feature that starts shooting in LA next month, and every week of prep has reminded me why I wanted to make it here in the first place.

There is an absurd amount of talent in this city.

Actors who have spent years getting very good while waiting for somebody to give them the part that actually shows it.

DPs, designers, sound people and crew who can look at some neglected corner of Los Angeles and immediately see a movie there.

And audiences full of people whose lives are happening all over this city but who rarely see those lives reflected back at them on screen.

Yesterday we were scouting along the LA River with our DP. Skate park. Parking lots. Concrete. Freeways. People going about their day. Nothing remotely glamorous.

And he started getting excited.

So did I.

Because that is the movie.

Maybe Hollywood leaves Los Angeles.

Fine.

Los Angeles is still here.

And there are still a hell of a lot of people here dreaming about living a creative life.

For the LA filmmakers who are still here:

Does anyone still believe in making movies in this town?

We brought our DP out yesterday to scout one of the main locations for a $100K feature I’m producing in LA.

The thing that got all of us excited wasn’t one perfect angle. It was realizing how many different jobs this one place could do.

Within basically the same footprint we have the LA River, a park, a parking lot, a skate park, areas that can play as completely different parts of the story, plus somewhere we can potentially stage base camp without moving the circus every six hours.

Which, at this budget, starts to feel less like location scouting and more like finding buried treasure.

The interesting part was watching the DP start seeing shots and possibilities we hadn’t even considered. That’s usually the moment I know a location is actually helping the movie instead of just looking good in a scout photo.

For producers who’ve done microbudget features: how much weight do you put on “production efficiency” when choosing locations?

Would you take a B+ location that can give you four or five looks over an A+ location that only works for one scene?

I’m increasingly convinced the answer is yes.

A few Santa Monica frames I’ve always liked.

There isn’t really an event happening in any of them. I think I was more interested in the emptiness, the color, and those slightly strange little details that somehow feel very LA to me.

Do photographs like these need a stronger subject, or can the atmosphere itself be the subject?

Three frames from the same stretch of desert at sunset.

I keep changing my mind about which composition works best. The first is probably the most dramatic, but I’m drawn to the stranger shapes in the others.

If you were printing one, which would you choose: 1, 2, or 3?

On my last post, several people commented that although they liked the lighting and photograph, the pose made the subject feel uncomfortable.

That stuck with me.

These are two portraits from the same shoot. #2 is much more directed: pose, hands, body language, lighting. #1 strips almost all of that away.

Which one feels more natural to you? And can a heavily directed portrait still feel authentic?

We had our first rehearsal for CONCRETE RIVER today, and something happened that I keep thinking about.

One of our lead characters had been written with a specific mixed-race background. Once we got the actress in the room, we realized it made more sense to change the character’s ethnicity to reflect who she actually is.

On the wrong production, I can imagine that being treated like a problem. Racial insensitivity. Some executive asking whether we were “confusing the audience.”

For this movie, it felt like the opposite.

The whole point of CONCRETE RIVER is that mixed identity is complicated, specific, and not reducible to one neat combination of races. The more time I spend listening to people here and working through the film with our cast, the more I think the interesting thing is not exactly which boxes someone checks.

It’s what it means to grow up between things.

Between cultures. Between families. Between languages, religions, neighborhoods, expectations. Between how you see yourself and how everyone else decides to see you.

And increasingly, that feels less like some niche identity experience and more like a fundamentally American one.

We live in a country built out of migration, intermarriage, assimilation, reinvention, displacement, contradiction, and people carrying pieces of several places at once. Obviously race matters. History matters. Specific cultures matter. I would never want to flatten those differences into some cheerful “we’re all the same” speech.

But the mixture itself feels central to where America is now.

Cinema has always been one of the places where we decide which kinds of people get turned into mythology. Cowboys. Gangsters. Soldiers. Detectives. Rebels. Lovers.

It would be strange if the people we put at the center of those stories didn’t start looking more like the country actually does.

So changing this character today didn’t feel like compromising the idea of the movie.

It felt like understanding it better.

What do you think? Do you think of being mixed as a distinct identity unto itself, or as one version of a much larger American experience of growing up between cultures and categories?

I’m producing a low-budget feature called CONCRETE RIVER, written and directed by Maris Lidaka.

We have our first rehearsal Monday with our two leads.

One has solid network TV experience. The other has only done one short, but has a strong social following and a lot of natural presence.

Good problem to have.

Rehearsal on an indie feature is rare. Usually the schedule is tight, the money is tighter, and rehearsal starts looking like a luxury.

On this movie, the central relationship *is* the movie.

If that doesn’t work, we’re dead. Doesn’t matter how good the locations are. Doesn’t matter how much the city gives us. Doesn’t matter how pretty the light is while the film quietly collapses.

So I’m curious how people here use limited rehearsal time.

Table work? Character history? Relationship dynamics? Improv? Problem scenes? Just letting the actors get comfortable with each other before production starts chewing through the day?

I’m especially interested in working with two actors who have very different levels of experience. I don’t want us to over-direct them. I also don’t want to waste the one room where we can actually slow down.

For people who’ve done low-budget features:

What helped in rehearsal?

What felt useful but didn’t translate?

And what do you wish you’d figured out before day one?

I’ve been posting here about trying to produce a low-budget feature in LA for around $100K.

The response has been a real mix.

Some people have been generous and practical. Volunteering their time and/or expertise. Real writers offering to read and give notes. Real crew raising their hand to help out. And also things like “Don’t be an idiot about sound”, which, fair.

Other people have been much darker about it.

A recurring warning is that a movie at this level is basically impossible once unions, permits, insurance, crew pay, post, and reality all show up with knives. Some of that is useful. Some of it starts to feel less like advice and more like, “Keep talking publicly and you’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

Maybe that’s just Reddit being Reddit.

But it raises a real question for me:

How transparent *can* you be while building a tiny indie in public?

I'm interested in talking honestly about the process. The budget problems. The compromises. The things we may be wrong about.

But I also don’t want to accidentally create a paper trail that makes the project look dangerous, amateur, or like an easy target for people who assume every low-budget producer is trying to exploit somebody.

I can handle trolls. That’s just the price of posting these days.

What I’m less sure about is where openness stops being useful and starts creating problems for the production.

For producers who’ve made films at this level:

How much did you share publicly while you were in prep?

Did transparency help build trust and audience?

Or is the only way to do this that you have to keep the sausage-making private until the movie is finished?

A few frames from a Half Dome hike my wife and I did a few years back.

There were some serious wildfires burning that day, so the whole valley had this strange, hazy, apocalyptic glow to it. Not exactly ideal breathing conditions, but it made for some pretty unreal light.

Shot on my old Mamiya 7ii.