Preserving Los Angeles, highlighting dozens of lesser-known buildings, neighborhoods, and places in every corner of the city that have been “found” by SurveyLA, the first-ever city-wide survey of Los Angeles’ historic resources. The text is richly illustrated through images by a prominent architectural photographer, Stephen Schafer.
Documentary Photography
2020 – The Year We Blow Past 100 Documentations
A little list of the HABS, HAER, and HALS documentations Schaf Photo has competed in the past 10+ years…
Workshop December 8, 2019 – Architecture on Location with Stephen Schafer
I'm teaching another architecture workshop in December 8th, 2019 at LACP: https://lacphoto.org/events/architecture-on-location-with-stephen-schafer-2019/ Mastering architecture photography and location is a complex yet rewarding process. Like people, buildings have their best side, and choosing your perspective, composition and camera placement for both interiors and exteriors will be a focus. In this workshop we will examine the intricate…
CEQA Documentation Mitigations for Historic (Cultural) Resources
The example below is a CEQA compliant Level 2 HABS mitigation for a significant historic district, campus, farmstead or any multi-unit grouping of resources. This example follows the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Architectural, Engineering and Landscape Documentation.
Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) Highlights: 9430 Wilshire Blvd. May-2016
Here’s some highlights from my documentation of 9430 Wilshire Blvd in Beverly Hills… Often the images in the HABS, HAER and HALS collections take years to be digitized…
Photographer’s Eye: Capturing History Forever, Photographing for the Historic American Buildings Survey
HABS, as the Historic American Buildings Survey is informally called, is arguably the best documentation program in the world for historic buildings. Stephen Schafer has been practicing this archival photographic process to capture sites in California as diverse as an 1840s adobe and a Cold-War stealth ship.
HABS/HAER/HALS Documentations from 2017 and 2018
A selection of my favorite large format negatives from the last couple years of Historic American Buildings Survey photography (HABS). By Stephen Schafer, Ventura, California, (805)-652-1000
HABS Mitigation for CEQA (Part 1: Is Cheaper Also Better?)
Documentation of historic resources is one way to mitigate impacts to significant properties and photographic documentation is one facet of a comprehensive CEQA mitigation strategy, and donating it to the National Park Service through their informal donation policy is less expensive than distributing multiple archival copies locally. The data created for HABS/HAER/HALS requires a Life Expectancy of over 500 years… Can your local historical society do that?
New Book About San Francisco’s Pier 70 Buildings
Announcing the publication of the softcover version of the San Francisco Pier 70 Historic Building Documentation book.
Photographing the First California HAER Documentation, HAER-CA-1 (again)
We executed a documentation mitigation to HABS/HAER/HALS standards to be transmitted as an addendum to the 1975 materials. New drawings and report were prepared by historical architecture firm Garavaglia Architecture in Downtown San Francisco and we were brought in to document the exterior and interior before changes were made.