The Light

Every photograph on this site was taken by somebody else. Most are shared under a Creative Commons license and two are in the public domain. Each line below links the original file and names the photographer, with the license it carries and whatever was changed to fit it here.

These are other people's pictures, and the site runs on the terms they set. Where a license asks for attribution, this page is the attribution.

The photographs

• Hero, daytime: Tequila Sunset by Josh Rose, CC0. Cropped, tinted.
• Hero, evening (from 7 p.m. your time), and the Mulholland hero: Dance With The Moon by Thaddeus Dimaculangan, CC BY 3.0. Cropped, tinted.
• Hero, night (midnight to 6 a.m.), and the After dark hero: Los Angeles at night by Hannes Flo, CC BY 2.0. Cropped, tinted.
• The listen section, and a figure on night drive: DTLA Skyline by demxx, CC BY 2.0. Cropped, darkened.
• Night drive hero and the release page: Downtown LA at Sunset. by Kevin Stanchfield, CC BY 2.0. Originally posted to Flickr. Resized.
• The homepage strip, and a figure on golden hour: Griffith Observatory skyline at sunset by Kasper Bertelsen, CC0. Cropped.
• The homepage strip again, and a second figure on golden hour: Los Angeles at twilight from Griffith Observatory by athrasher, CC0. Cropped.
• The golden hour hero, and the homepage strip: Downtown LA at Sunrise by Rami Ammoun, CC BY 3.0. Cropped.
• The marine layer hero, and the contact page: Santa Monica Sunset by Zi Xian Leong, CC BY 3.0. Cropped, darkened. Two crops of this one photograph are in use. The wide one is the hero on the marine layer page, and the narrower one is on the contact page and in the homepage strip.
• The about page: Venice Beach palm trees at sunset by Stuart Guest-Smith, CC0. Cropped.
• A figure on the marine layer: Los Angeles by Akos Kokai, CC BY 2.0. Cropped from the top. The photographer titled it only with the name of the city.
• A second figure on the marine layer: Foggy day at Mullholland Drive and Pyramid Place in Los Angeles by jvoves, CC BY 2.0. Resized. The gold cast is the photographer's own toning and has been left alone. The spelling of the title is theirs.
• A figure on Mulholland at night: Sunset over the San Fernando Valley by Shawn Hinsey, CC BY 2.0. Resized. The photographer places it at San Vicente Mountain Park.
• A figure on night drives: Figueroa Street Tunnel No. 2, north portal, photographed by Brian Grogan for the Historic American Engineering Record, public domain. Cropped to the image area of the negative, which removes the film border and the photographer's edge markings.
• A second figure on night drives: C Line train Harbor Freeway by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, public domain. Resized.

The licenses

CC0

The photographer has given up their rights as far as the law allows, so no credit is required. It is given anyway. Read the CC0 deed.

CC BY 2.0

Free to use and to alter, including commercially, as long as the photographer is credited and the license is named. Read the CC BY 2.0 deed.

CC BY 3.0

The same bargain in a later wording of it. Read the CC BY 3.0 deed.

Public domain

Two of the photographs carry no copyright at all, one from a federal survey of the Arroyo Seco Parkway and one from the transit agency that runs the line in it. Nothing is required in return for using them. They are credited here on the same footing as the rest. Read the public domain mark.

Fonts

The sign face is Ruthie. Headings are set in Orbitron and body text in Exo 2. All three are under the SIL Open Font License, and all three are served from this site rather than from anyone else's.

Using these images yourself

A license runs with the photograph and not with this site, so anyone can use any of these on the same terms. Start from the file linked in its line rather than the copy served here, which has been resized for the web and in most cases cropped or darkened to sit behind text. If you change one, say that you changed it. That is the condition of a CC BY license that gets forgotten most often.

Where the images appear

Three of them are on golden hour, the page that reads each picture for what is actually in the frame. Two more sit on night drives and two on the marine layer. The rest are spread across the city section, the about page and the front of the site. What this site stores about you, which is close to nothing, is set out on the privacy page.