by Dana Ross
I work as a freelance photographer in Los Angeles, going to most of my jobs on bicycle. Too many fun things happen to me on my bike every day to make me want to sit in a car (though I do have one), and I have better health now, in my forties, than I have ever had before. Most of my jobs are within an eight-mile radius of my home. I purposely chose to live in a central part of the city close to my suppliers and clients. It works.
I have to bring camera equipment with me and usually I can bring it all on my bicycle. I do have a trailer I use when I need more equipment, and of course there is always the car as a last resort.
One day I was in a recording session with a group of classical guitarists. I was with them all through the day and on till midnight. I shared in the champagne and celebration at the end of the session. I had missed trick-or-treating with my kids that night, but riding home brought me smack dab into the traffic jam of the century: West Hollywood was having its big Halloween bash, which closes a major thoroughfare for over a mile. There were so many tens of thousands of costumed adults filling the wide boulevard for twenty blocks that it felt like being in a crowded elevator. What parking was available was miles away, but I was on my bicycle and filled with energy. I had to get off and push my bike to make it through this amazing party, and I enjoyed every second of it. It was my celebration for a well-paid, joyful day. Had I been more sensible and brought my car I would have had to bypass this wonderful event, thinking of it as congestion to be avoided. I've been back every year since, to photograph it--on my bicycle, of course.
At the Hollywood Bowl thousands of cars are stack parked in their lots, and you can't leave after a concert until all the cars in front of you have left. This can be a thirty minute nightmare, but on a warm summer evening after a concert, I just unlock the bike, coast out of the parking lot at my ease, and enjoy my ride to the photo lab and then home.
Once, just as I arrived at a recording studio to photograph Yo-Yo Ma, my rear tire exploded--good timing. I locked up my bike out front, came in, shot for an incredible few hours, had a nice Scotch after. When all was done I went outside, sat at the curb, put in a new tube, loaded up my bike and pedaled off.
On one shoot, the Gala Season Opening Night and party for one of L.A.'s orchestras, I pedaled into the back of the concert hall just minutes before a lightning storm and deluge. I had no idea this was coming and hadn't brought rain gear at all, though I did have my tuxedo with me. The concert was great, and the party was better. By good fortune, the rain stopped a few minutes before midnight and I pedaled home dry as a bone.
I was to shoot a film-scoring session for an up-and-coming movie composer at Paramount Pictures. I thought it would be good for both of us to get some publicity on his first film and called the L.A. Times to see if there was interest in doing an article on him. They ended up getting excited about me doing my jobs by bicycle and wrote a nice article about me as well, with photos! I love going onto the movie studio lots by bike. I have to wait for security clearance in a line of Mercedes, Vipers, Porsches, and Ferraris, and then there is me on my bicycle. After they give me my pass I have complete freedom to pedal all over the lot. Bicycles are everywhere on movie lots. Carpenters have bikes with cargo boxes in front, but most gaffers and grips get around on clunkers.
Sometimes I forget why cars are better than bicycles. We get unhealthy sitting in them, we poison the ourselves with the exhaust, we isolate ourselves from others inside them, we have a hard time parking them, we work too hard to make the money to pay for them, we kill almost 50,000 people a year with them in the U.S. alone. Sometimes, not all that often if you're practical about it, we do need them; that's when I use mine.
Dana Ross is a commercial photographer in West Los Angeles. His friend Ben Swets, another bicycling photographer, took the picture.
