Today we say what will probably be goodbye to a beautiful home in Los Angeles MediaCarrot photographed for our client Jerry Sun, with Re/Max, www.jerrysun.com. It’s a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2,255 sq. ft. house built in 1927 and is listed as a fixer upper but it definitely needs someone with an extreme attention to detail. Deep pockets wouldn’t hurt either, parts of the floor are a little treacherous. It was the longtime home of Charles and Betty Quon and their family. It’s sad that the pictures we take are only able to show how the house is right now. We can't photograph Betty playing the piano for her family, or their children running over the orange carpet when it was new. They had several collections of cameras, baseball cards, gorgeous art and figurines from their ancestral China. Betty even had a Betty Boop collection. We can only show the rather ramshackle kitchen that feels small by modern standards but saw the creation of many delicious meals and maybe a spectacular kitchen disaster the family still remembers fondly. Pictures can’t capture the laughter of family and friends that rang through every room over the years. We can show now, where a picture hung over the fireplace protecting part of the wall from dust, where the small cutting board counter shows heavy use, where the orange carpet is worn down between the kitchen and the dining room. As old and in need of repair as it is there is a lot of beauty in it. A house that is used, a house that was a home.
photography stories
Wall of Doodles
Creepy Photography Stories
It's Halloween, so as a special treat we are featuring a couple of our favorite creepy stories from shoots over the years. Now, we will be the first to admit that most of the time we scare ourselves by listening to ghost story or murder story podcasts while navigating Los Angeles traffic to a shoot, but that was not a factor in either of these stories.
Our first is from a shoot involving our owner, Laura and our main assistant, Colleen a few years ago. On a bright sunny day in June, they went to a vacant house to do some light staging, mostly involving pillows, blankets, and fake flowers before taking the usual set of photos. Vacant houses tend to have a higher creepy factor anyways. The fact that this house had been remodeled and you could still smell the paint didn't change anything. The minute they entered the house Colleen, who is not very sensitive to creepy energy requested this be a fast shoot. She said something made her uneasy and Laura had the same feeling.
They moved through the house setting up the staging and in one bedroom Colleen set up a cute little reading nook in a corner with a stack of pillows, a blanket, and a couple books. While she set up another room, Laura photographed the bedroom adjusting a book without think of it. After they finished the whole shoot and cleaned up Laura teased Colleen about standing in the doorway of the bedroom and just throwing the books in the room since one was halfway across the floor. Colleen went pale and said she'd gone all the way in and laid the book open on the blanket.
Our next story if from only a couple years after Laura started MediaCarrot. She was alone on a photo shoot at another vacant house and kept trying to use the key provided in the lockbox to open the front door. It wouldn't turn even after ten minutes of pushing and pulling on the door and trying every key trick she knew she finally had to stop and call the agent to ask if they had a different key. The agent assistant who answered said no, that was the only key they had. Laura said she'd try again but if she couldn't get in she'd have to reschedule the shoot to a time when the agent was present. She hung up, turned back to the door, and tried once again.
Only this time the door. just. creaked. open before she even got the key in the lock.
Ever the professional, Laura did get through the photoshoot though she claims it's still the fastest solo shoot she's ever done.