News and Information About HABS, HAER and HALS Photography
A Born-Digital HABS Photo Standard is Coming Someday, but not yet. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS*), the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) programs are the way America documents its significant inherited environment. For the last 93 years HABS has documented built America exceptionally well, with honest, unmanipulated…
Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion about the Vaillancourt Fountain at the Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco. The fountain is historic, and these two photographs were taken of the plaza and fountain in 2022 when I was documenting the Market Street Historic Landscape District, a 2.3 mile-long section of Market Street from The Ferry…
There’s a really good (ongoing) discussion on the Large Format Forum about camera-scanning 4×5 and 5×7 negatives for HABS, HAER, or HALS. I use a DSLR (or Mirrorless) camera and a copy stand to photograph my negatives and create 30+ Megapixel digital photographs. Follow the discussion here: https://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?157757-4×5-amp-5×7-Negatives-Camera-Scanning-with-Nikon-D800E&highlight=habs
Today, I got an official HABS number from HDP, after looking through some files and finding the negatives. HABS CA-3002. This week the motel was lost in the Palisades Fire.
Just found two new sets of scanned records on the HABS site today. As the LoC slowly gets through the backlog of HABS/HAER/HALS photos waiting for scans from the last couple decades. It's nice to see some of my photos out in the public domain where they belong. These two examples of historic survey photography…
… honored to be included in this short educational photography session sponsored by the California Preservation Foundation (californiapreservation.org) and the California Garden and Landscape History Society (cglhs.org).
Photography of The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner Building is part of the LAC+USC Medical Center campus in Lincoln Heights.
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…
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.
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