Thistle While You Workshop

January 25, 2012 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

Arlington Avenue is a divided street that runs a block away from my home from Marin Circle in North Berkeley to downtown Kensington, California—a quaint low-key strip that hosts a friendly post office in the drugstore and California-Spanish style architecture. Arlington Ave is notable because the Hayward Fault, a major earthquake fault zone that is “capable of generating significantly destructive earthquakes” (as the Wikipedia puts it), runs right along the center road divider as it passes through Berkeley, California.

In summer months, when plant growth around here begins to be so prolific as to be excessive, the median strip of Arlington Ave that lies above the Hayward Fault also becomes one of my sources for photographic subject matter.

I watched a clump of thistles growing for several weeks and then decided I needed to capture one to bring back to my studio for photography. My oldest son Julian came with me on the thistle-gathering expedition. We wore our most thorn-proof clothing and inner and outer gloves, and used an extra long pruner. Even so, this thistle drew blood when I cut it down, and carried it away for photography.

In the studio, I placed the thistle upright in front of a lightbox. I then lit the front of the thistle with a warm, Tungsten photo light. I bracketed exposures to create and effect of layered transparency and extended dynamic range when the exposures were combined in Photoshop.

Thistle © Harold Davis

From the moment I began to see this image come together in my viewfinder, I knew I had something. This thistle’s motto may have been “we always hurt the ones we love,” or at least the ones who photograph us, but there’s a thrill in creating imagery when everything goes right and when one is “in the zone” that is hard to beat and makes the pain of a thistle’s thorns seem like nothing!

I look forward to sharing my joy in photography and the fantastic high of successful image making when I give a workshop—hence the offerings you’ll see below.

The day after I shot this photo city crews came along, chopped down all the wonderful weeds including my thistle patch, and put them through a shredder. If I’d waited a day more, the thistle would have been gone. One of the lessons I’ve learned in a life largely devoted to photography is carpe diem—to seize the day. In other words, when you see a photo, take it. There are always good reasons for procrastination and delay, like one has to be somewhere, or it is too much trouble. Eschew these lame excuses! If not now, when? This is a good way to live life generally, a good way to be a photography—and in my admittedly biased opinion a good way to approach signing up for workshops!

Please consider these new workshop offerings (note special early-bird pricing through February 14, 2012):

Digital Black & White Master Class: Full Day Workshop with Vincent Versace & Harold Davis

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn from two of the masters of contemporary monochromatic photography. Registration.

Vincent Versace is the author of From Oz to Kansas: Almost Every Black & White Technique Known to Man and Harold Davis is the author of Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (in addition to other bestselling books from both master photographers).

Topics covered in this workshop will include:

The monochromatic vision: learning to see the world in black & white
The craft of digital black & white
Digital black & white workflow
Monochromatic conversion in Lightroom
Nik Silver Efex 2
Working in Photoshop to perfect your black & white images
Monochromatic HDR
Tips & techniques from both Harold Davis and Vincent Versace
Making fine black & white prints

In addition, there will be time for individual portfolio reviews (plan to bring no more than six black & white prints or six images in JPEG format on a USB drive).

Workshop fee includes a finger-licking BBQ lunch from Everett & Jones. Vegetarian dishes and salads will also be served.

Who is this workshop for?

If you are interested in black & white photography and would like to take your work to the next level this is a rare opportunity to perfect your technique and be inspired by two legendary photographers and teachers! This workshop is primarily intended for serious amateurs and professionals who already have some experience with digital black & white photography.
Where: MIG Meeting Place, 800 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94710

When: Saturday March 10, 2012, 9:30AM

Tuition: Early-bird Valentine’s special! Register by February 14, 2012 to save $100. The cost of the workshop is $295 per person until 5PM on February 14th. Thereafter the full cost of the workshop is $395 per person. Workshop limited to 25 participants. Information and Registration.

Full Day Workshop: HDR (High Dynamic Range) Bootcamp with Harold Davis

Are you curious about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography? Do you want to learn the gamut of techniques for extending dynamic range in your photos? Would you like to unleash the full power of HDR photography but don’t know the “secrets”? Registration.

If the answer to any of these questions is “Yes,” then HDR (High Dynamic Range) Bootcamp with Harold Davis is for you!

In this intensive, full-day workshop, Harold will show you how to shoot for HDR, how to extend dynamic range using multi-RAW processing, using automated HDR software including Photomatix and Nik HDR Efex Pro, and hand HDR processing in Photoshop.

In this workshop Harold reveals the secrets of HDR that you can’t learn anywhere else. With the HDR techniques taught in this workshop your photos will never be the same.

Besides mastering HDR techniques, and most important of all, Harold will help you develop your own style of HDR photography.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is intended for intermediate to advanced photographers who are new to HDR, or have tried HDR and want to learn more about it (or are unhappy with their results).

Please contact us for clarification if you aren’t sure if this workshop is appropriate for you.
Where: MIG Meeting Place, 800 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94710

When: Saturday March 24, 2012, 9:30AM to 5:30PM

Tuition: Early-bird Valentine’s special! Register by February 14, 2012 to save $50. The cost of the workshop is $145 per person until 5PM on February 14th. Thereafter the full cost of the workshop is $195 per person. Workshop limited to 18 participants. Information and Registration.

Other Harold Davis workshops

Please also keep in mind these workshops. There are only a few places left in each of these workshops and we expect them to sell out completely (so if you are interested in attending please don’t delay in registering):

Saturday, February 25, 2012: Full Day Workshop: Get Your Camera Off Automatic with Harold Davis. Have you always wanted to take fantastic photos, but somehow they never seem to come out as well as you see them in your mind’s eye? By leaving their camera in one of the programmed automatic modes many photographers fail to realize their full creative potential. At the same time, if you don’t shoot manually you won’t learn the basic concepts of photography. In this intensive one-day workshop you will learn all you need to know to successfully support your creative vision by using your camera to its full potential. There are currently only four spots left in this workshop. More information; register now!
Saturday, May 5, 2012: Full Moon Workshop, Photograph the Golden Gate Bridge Like You Never Have Before. There are a few places left for this semi-private workshop. More information and registration.
Friday, August 3 – Monday, August 6, 2012: Tao of Photography Workshop with Harold Davis at the Green Dragon Temple. Spaces are going quickly for this unique workshop that includes accommodations and all meals in the beautiful Marin Headlands near San Francisco. More information and registration.

You can learn more about Harold’s workshops and free events at the Photography with Harold Davis meetup; here’s the link to Harold’s calendar.

About Harold Davis

Legendary master photographer Harold Davis has been described as a “great teacher,” as someone whose “passion for teaching about photography is only second to doing photography in a creative way,” and as having “great skill without the ego of most master photographers.”

Harold Davis is an award-winning professional photographer and widely recognized as one of the leading contemporary photographers.

He is the author of more than 30 books, including Creating HDR Photos: The Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Photography, Photographing Flowers: Exploring Macro Worlds with Harold Davis (Focal Press), The Photoshop Darkroom 2: Creative Digital Transformations (Focal Press), and The Photoshop Darkroom: Creative Digital Post-Processing (Focal Press).

Harold is the author of the Creative Photography series from Wiley Publishing.

“Harold Davis’s Creative Photography series is a great way to start a photography library”—Daniel Fealko, PhotoFidelity.

The Creative titles include: Creative Landscapes: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley), Creative Lighting: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley), Creative Portraits: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley), Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley), Creative Composition: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley), Creative Night: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley), Creative Close-Ups: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley). He’s also written a book on the fundamentals of exposure, Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers (O’Reilly Media).

Posted in Workshops

Cherry Dance

January 20, 2012 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

Cherry Dance is manifestly a digital art creation. This collage combines a photo of blossoms on a cherry branch with two flat-bed scans of paper—using Photoshop to create a whole that resembles Japanese brush painting as much as it does tradional photography.

Cherry Dance © Harold Davis

There’s no doubt that cherry blossoms are among my most popular subjects and widely viewed. I’m amused (and flattered) that in one case an attractive lady has had a facsimile of one of my cherry branch images emblazened on her own epidermis.

By the way, check out Creative Flower Photography Q&A with Harold Davis on the O’Reilly YouTube channel.

Posted in Flowers, Photoshop Techniques

You Are What You Photograph

January 16, 2012 by Harold Davis | 2 Comments

Are you what you photograph? They say, “You are what you eat.” In a certain simplisitic sense this is obviously true. Therefore, if you photograph what you eat then you are what you photograph—as in the case of the leek I photographed below in cross section that became a flavorful part of our dinner soup.

Leek © Harold Davis

More generally, I believe that one can learn a great deal about a person by looking at their photos. It’s well known that historical fiction writers are really writing about their own times—in disguised or metaphorical terms. Similarly, no matter what one photographs—even if the images aren’t explicitly autographical—one is really telling a story about oneself.

So what does this macro shot of a leek say about me?

Do you agree that photos tell the story of the photographer making the image? Disagree? Please add your comment. Feel free to include a link back to your photos, edible, autobiographical or otherwise.

Posted in Bemusements, Patterns, Photography

Getting Off Automatic

January 13, 2012 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

As a professional photographer I almost always use my camera in manual exposure mode. Most of the time I have no use for programmed automatic or semi-automatic modes—or, God forbid, one of those exposure modes beloved of lower-end cameras such as “Sunset Mode” (yes, there really are cameras with such pointless exposure modes).

One reason for learning to use your camera without relying on the prop of automatic exposure is because setting the controls yourself is the only way to really learn about the fundamentals of photography.

I run into many photographers in my workshops who want to become more creative photographers, and want to learn to take control of their cameras, but are stopped because they don’t really understand either basic photographic principles or how these principles are implemented in their camera’s controls.

So I decided to address these issues head-on in a one-day intensive workshop, Get Your Camera Off Automatic with Harold Davis, to be given here in Berkeley, California on Saturday, February 25, 2012 in the spacious and convenient MIG Meeting Room. Click here for more information and registration, or see the full description below the image.

Star Gazer © Harold Davis

Full Day Workshop: Get Your Camera Off Automatic with Harold Davis

Have you always wanted to take fantastic photos, but somehow they never seem to come out as well as you see them in your mind’s eye?

By leaving their camera in one of the programmed automatic modes many photographers fail to realize their full creative potential. At the same time, if you don’t shoot manually you won’t learn the basic concepts of photography. In this intensive one-day workshop you will learn all you need to know to successfully support your creative vision by using your camera to its full potential.

Besides presentations from award-winning master photographer Harold Davis, this workshop uses hands-on exercises to “cement-in” the concepts you will learn. So please bring your camera, camera manual, and tripod (if you have one).

Who is this workshop for?
If you’ve been enjoying shooting digital photos, but don’t really understand the underlying photographic concepts or what the camera settings do this workshop is a fun way to get quickly up to speed.

Perhaps you are used to shooting film and want to get up to speed on the concepts of digital photography. Then this intensive “Digital Photography 101” workshop may be for you.

Intermediate digital photographers may also be interested in this workshop as an easy way to help them reinforce and remember what they’ve previously learned.

Where: MIG Meeting Place, 800 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94710

When: Saturday Feb 25, 2012, 9:45AM

Tuition: $99 per person. Workshop limited to 20 participants.

What to bring: Your camera, camera manual, tripod (if you have one), and a sense of fun and wonder!

Registration: http://www.meetup.com/Harold-Davis/events/47725812/

Curriculum
9:45AM – Workshop orientation
10:00 – Fundamental concepts: Exposure, the exposure triangle, aperture, f-stops, shutter speed, sensitivity (ISO), sensor size, focal length, focus
11:00 – Setting your camera using the basic concepts
11:30 – Hands-on exercises
12:30 – Lunch break
1:15PM – Exercise review and concept refresher
2:00 – From camera to computer and digital post-production
3:00 – Hands-on exercises
4:00 – Review, wrap-up and Q&A

About Harold Davis

Harold Davis is an award-winning professional photographer and widely recognized as one of the leading contemporary photographers.

He is the author of more than 30 books, including Photographing Flowers: Exploring Macro Worlds with Harold Davis (Focal Press), The Photoshop Darkroom 2: Creative Digital Transformations (Focal Press), and The Photoshop Darkroom: Creative Digital Post-Processing (Focal Press).

Harold is the author of the Creative Photography series from Wiley Publishing.

“Harold Davis’s Creative Photography series is a great way to start a photography library”—Daniel Fealko, PhotoFidelity.

Posted in Photography, Workshops

Floral Tapestries

January 8, 2012 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

Floral Tapestry Panorama by Harold Davis

Floral Tapestry Panorama © Harold Davis

To create these images, I arranged flowers on a lightbox that was proportionally much wider than it was tall. Next, I shot straight down with a macro lens, bracketing for an HDR effect. I discarded the dark exposures, so my brackets essentially went from “correct” exposure to way overexposed (almost white).

I shot the arrangements in segments, moving my camera parallel to the arrangement on the lightbox. Here’s the full exposure data for each segment: 50mm macro lens, six exposures at shutter speeds ranging from 3/10 sec. to 15 seconds at f/11 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

In post-production, I first combined each segment into a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image, using hand layer painting in Photoshop to create a transparent effect as I explain in Photographing Flowers: Exploring Macro Worlds with Harold Davis on pages 182-185.

Next, I composited the HDR segments together in Photoshop. This took a measure of warping and related transformations to get the alignment exacttly right, even though I had tried my best to shoot the segments carefully so they could be easily aligned.

In other words, this process created an unusual kind of HDR panorama—HDR because the dynamic range has been extended, and panorma because each image is far wider than it is high.

By the way, if you click each of the HDR panos shown in this story you’ll see a larger version of each floral panorama. Here’s an earlier blog story I wrote about Making an HDR Floral Panorama.

I also have provided more information about how I made these images in my forthcoming Creating HDR Photos on pages 82-85. I even included a setup shot!

Check out my Floral Tapestry set on Flickr for more of the images that I’ve been making in the past year that include various kinds of photographic techniques, scanned papers and fabrics, and post-production work. Most of these images are not panoramic, but I think you’ll agree that the effects are quite appealing and unusual.

Floral Medley Panorama © Harold Davis

Posted in Flowers, HDR, Photography

Workbench

January 6, 2012 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

Over the winter holidays I took our boys on a “field trip” to Fort Ross State Historic Park. Fort Ross marks the furthest point south of the expansion of the Russians down the California coast in the early 1800s. It was erected as a counter-point to the burgeoning Spanish colony of Yuerba Buena, later to become San Francisco.

Part of the natural defences of Fort Ross lie in the remoteness and rugged nature of the Sonoma Coast. This is beautiful country, and I plan to come back for some extensive photography when I don’t have four boys in tow!

: Workbench © Harold Davis

Fort Ross has been extensively restored. The ongoing effort is a jointly financed venture with a Russian organization—a very good thing considering the service reductions at California state parks.

The artifacts within the buildings are not all from the original fort, but they are from the right historic period, and make a natural subject for High Dynamic Range (HDR). I particularly enjoyed photographing the workshops and this workbench.

As with Agaves, I tried to achieve an effect closer to that of an etching than a conventional black & white photo when I photographed the workbench. I shot seven exposures at shutter speeds ranging from 1/8 of a second to 25 seconds. I used a tripod, and made each exposure at 46mm, f/9, and ISO 100. The exposures were combined using Nik HDR Efex Pro and hand-HDR layering Photoshop. Then I converted to black & white using Nik Silver Efex Pro, Photoshop Black & White Adjustment Layers, and the monochromatic presets in Nik HDR Efex Pro.

Multi-shot HDR photography does take a bit of care, not to mention some time. So I was lucky the boys were happy playing in the fort, and clambering on and off the canons. They are shown with one below.

Boys at Fort Ross © Harold Davis

Posted in HDR, Monochrome, Photography, Still Life

Liz

January 5, 2012 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

This is a shot of professional model Liz Ashley. The lighting is from one strobe, hand-held to the left of the camera.

Liz © Harold Davis

Posted in Models

Agaves

January 2, 2012 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

In the dead of winter there’s not much color, even in California’s usually highly saturated gardens. The Tilden Park Botanic Garden emphasizes California native plants. It’s always a wonderful place to wander, but at the turning of the year I looked for texture and form rather than color.

Agaves © Harold Davis

The succulent gardens, and in particularly these agaves, seemed to answer my needs. I multi-shot the images for High Dynamic Range (HDR) in black and white using my new 40mm macro lens. My idea in processing the image was to create an effect almost like an etching rather than a photo, as in Tomales Bay and Choosing the Path.

Full exposure data: 40mm macro lens, four exposures at shutter speeds from 2.5 seconds to 1/6 of a second, each exposure at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted; exposures combined using Nik HDR Efex Pro and hand-HDR.

Related image: Succulent.

Posted in Monochrome, Patterns

Sunset Koan

December 28, 2011 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

On Christmas Day I calculated that from the summit of Wildcat Peak the sun would set directly behind the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. This seemed like a great excuse for hiking off some excess holiday indulgence, so in the afternoon I grabbed Julian (my oldest son) and we made for the Inspiration Point trailhead my cameras and tripod in tow.

We had a jolly time on the trail, and there were lots of happy people out and about, mostly with dogs and extended families. But up on Wildcat Peak it seemed that the band of coastal clouds would prevail. The Golden Gate could not be seen.

Stubbornly, we waited for sunset on the off-chance that there would be a brief respite in the weather—preferably just when the sun was setting behind the bridge. One of Julian’s endearing traits, and one that serves him well, is that he is almost never willing to give up on anything, even against all odds.

But the shot I’d prepared for didn’t seem likely. The sun was still above the cloud bank, but it was going down without the bridge being visible.

So I started fooling around with my 70-300mm zoom lens.

Sun Koan © Harold Davis

If you’ve ever pointed a lens with telephoto focal lengths at the setting sun and rotated the manual focus ring, you’ll have observed that the closer you focus the more out-of-focus the sun gets—and (this is the interesting part) also the larger the sun gets. This optical phenomenon is particularly true when you are shooting wide open at the maximum aperture of the lens.

I was having fun making the sun into a big orange ball that filled the entire frame by focusing my 300mm to about ten feet when all of a sudden the thought struck me, why not put something in the foreground?

There was no time to be lost. The big round ball at the horizon was setting into the fog bank. I hurried to try to find something interesting and close, and focused on a patch of bare weeds. Then, before I knew it, the sun was gone and the world turned gray and colorless.

The actual exposure settings for this image were, using my lens set to its maximum 300mm focal length, 1/8000 of a second at f/6.3 and ISO 200, hand held.

Back home, when I showed Julian the finished image, he was perplexed: “You made that photo from that litttle, random weed?!!?” he asked.

In life, often we go out looking for the dramatic sunset behind the Golden Gate Bridges in our lives. But it may be the little random weeds that really matter.

Somehow, in these days of renewal when the sun starts to come back from its long journey towards apparent oblivion, I find myself looking to photograph the sun, perhaps to assure myself that it is real.

Wave © Harold Davis

It always helps to put something in the foreground like the waves shown crashing in their interference patterns at North Beach on Point Reyes, California.

Foregrounds, random weeds, and the return of the sun: the makings of a meditation.

Wave 2 © Harold Davis

Posted in Bemusements, Landscape, Photography, Point Reyes, Tilden Park

Workshop Notes

December 24, 2011 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

Phyllis and I are pleased and excited to see Photography with Harold Davis so active. After only a few months we are now up to 460 members. We never expected such an immediate and positive response.

We have many exciting events planned for 2012, including a series of free webcasts as well as more free
Walk-and-Talks with Harold Davis and book give-aways. Check out Photography with Harold Davis for details!

I want to call your attention to the Tao of Photography Workshop at Green Dragon Temple and Zen Center in the Marin Headlands in early August. If you register by December 31, 2011 you save $200 over the full price.

Forest Sonata © Harold Davis

Please consider taking advantage of this early-bird special before the price rises on December 31, 2011. Why not send your special photographer friend as a post-Christmas treat, or (better yet!) go with them? This workshop includes accomodations for three nights as well as three scrumptuous organic vegetarian meals each day.

I’ve never been anywhere so apparently remote and beautiful as the Zen Center but also close to a major city (San Francisco). Check out the Tao of Photography Workshop at Green Dragon Temple for more information.

The Flower Photography Workshop with Harold Davis in early June is now sold out. If there is demand for it I will run this workshop again later in the summer.

If you are interested, please RSVP and add yourself to the waiting list for the June Flower Photography Workshop with Harold Davis. This will help us gauge interest in a second workshop, and I will give those who have are on the RSVP list first “dibbs” on spots in the second workshop.

Please consider the May Full Moon Workshop: Photograph the Golden Gate Bridge Like You Never Have Before.

Golden Gate Panorama © Harold Davis

To get an idea what you might expect, check out the comments from the last time we ran this workshop and the photos that participants made! Once again, this is an intimate workshop and places are very limited.

Thanks so much for being part of our photography community, and best wishes for 2012!

Save the dates. We have two exciting weekend workshops planned (but not formally announced), both under the aegis of the Point Reyes Field Insititute:

Friday June 1 – Sunday June 3, 2012: Macros, Close-Ups, and Flowers
Friday August 17 – Monday August 20, 2012: Ancient Bristlecone Pine Night Photography

Posted in Workshops

The Role of the Artist

December 23, 2011 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

Court jester or social conscience? You’ll find successful artists whose work falls into both these categories. For example, Jeff Koons is an intellectual light-weight who subcontracts out the actual construction of his work, and whose work exists as jokes to tillitate the ruling classes.

On the other hand, The Disasters of War by Goya show us, and leads us to deplore, the horrors of war. Diego Rivera’s murals speak of his radical political beliefs, while Sebastian Salgado’s photos show us exploited workers in places we will likely never visit—with the unspoken moral that this exploitation is a consequence of lifestyle choices made by those of us fortunate enough to live in a wealthy society.

Artists can also side-step the idea of contextual meaning. It’s possible to create work that is neither self-referential and joking trivia nor imbued with the gravitas of political tragedy.

Art has a middle space between buffoonery and finger-wagging morality.

There’s no social content or post-modernist wink-and-nod in the paintings of Vincent van Gogh or the photos of Edward Weston. These images are about beauty, line, form, shape and light—pure and simple. They may have been revolutionary in technique or the subject depicted—van Gogh’s brush strokes and Weston’s elegant images of toilets—but there’s absolutely no hint of social commentary or art world post-modernist games in the work of these great artists.

Real artists are not always social critics, nor are they twits.

Another question related to the role of the artist is where the artist fits into society. While early 21rst century United States is not the most rigidly class-bound society the world has ever seen—by any stretch of the imagination—it is clearly becoming more stratified into “haves” and “have nots.”

This is the basis for the rhetorical statements about the 1% (the haves) and the 99% (the have nots).

More realistically, this division should be between the .01% and the 99.99% rest of us.

In any case, for many people in many professions it is clear where they fit into the class heirarchy. Not so, for the artist who is even moderately successful.

I find that what goes with the territory is an ability to find value on a shoestring, and at the same time to be able to converse with successful professionals and top executives.

In other words, the artist is outside the normal class system, and perhaps can see the world more clearly than people who are stuck within it.

I reject utterly the role of court jester, working to enrich the art establishment and for the amusement of a few of the 1%. I also don’t feel the need to put my art in the service of my social conscience—unless by doing so I am creating better art.

But this doesn’t mean I can ignore the circumstances of the world anymore than anyone else. It’s really nothing to do with art or one’s profession. As best I can I need to live my life to help exemplify and promote the world I would like to see.

About the images: I shot these two images during a recent workshop I conducted at the Point Reyes Field Institute, in Point Reyes National Seashore, California. In both cases, my idea was to press the boundaries of photography—in Tomales Bay by creating an image that looks like a drypoint etching, and in Drakes Bay by Moonlight by echoing a 19th century seascape painting—without leaving the formal boundaries of digital photography.

Tomales Bay is toned as a conventional monochromatic photo. In other words, the color information in this image is no longer relevant. Drakes Bay by Moonlight is a subdued color image—and I resisted the temptation to add varnish and impasto painting effects to it in post-production.

Posted in Writing

Paperwhite Waterdrops

December 18, 2011 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

The Paperwhite, Narcissus papyraceus, is a small white flower related to the Daffodil. Grown from a bulb, the plant is originally from the Mediterranean basin. It’s commonly thought of as a house plant—and “forced” to bloom indoors for the winter holidays.

By the way, forcing a bulb is a process that to some extent negates the old saw that you can’t fool Mother Nature. The idea is to convince a bulb that it has slept through winter and come into spring—and that now is the time to send forth flowers. This psychological manipulation of the bulb is accomplished by cooling it in a dark place for some time and then putting it someplace warm, such as a sunny window, to experience virtual spring. A prisoner in a dark cell can have their sense of time totally warped in the interests of their captors, and the same thing is true when it comes to bulbs.

But I digress, a common thing for me when it comes to flowers. It seems that I have Paperwhites growing without being forced in my garden, and blooming this time of year. I don’t remember intentionally planting them. I think we must have been given a forced Paperwhite in a pot. After it was finished blooming I must have popped the bulb out of its pot and into the garden and forgotten about it, and, voilà, this little Narcissus papyraceus patch in December was the result. How cool is that?

In fact, it does not get very cold in my garden. It rarely gets any cooler than 45 degrees Farenheit here in the hills of Berkeley, California—cool enough for the Paperwhites, and temperate enough for me to stay warm even though the garden was wet from a light rain when I photographed these flowers the other morning.

Least Popular Posts: I’ve added a neat widget to my blog that displays the least popular posts I’ve ever written. You can see these neglected stories listed about half way down the Masthead on the right, just below Recent Posts. I thought these stories were dead and buried deep. There’s a certain morbid fascination in watching them rise from the blog post grave like the Undead—until some poor, hapless visitor to my blog clicks on them. By the very act of opening one of these stories they become more popular than their peers, and escape off the Undead Blog Story list!

Posted in Flowers, Photography, Water Drops

The eye believes what it thinks it sees

December 14, 2011 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

The eye believes what it thinks it sees. This allows us to enjoy magic shows, movies, and two-dimensional art such as painting and photography. Any two-dimensional representation of three dimensions is of course an illusion.

Problems begin when the brain gets into the act. The brain thinks it is the smart one, and doesn’t like playing the sap. If the first impression of reality isn’t utterly convincing then everything is subject to analysis—to the detriment of the viewing experience. In the writing trade, when this happens it is said that disbelief is no longer suspended.

In other words, we look at art to start with “willing suspension of disbelief.” As long as the artist doesn’t wantonly offend apparent reality this suspension of disbelief allows one to get away with murder.

Like trust, once belief is gone it is hard to earn it back. The best tactic is not to lose it in the first place.

The good news is that the brain isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. Whether belief is suspended or not, every time the brain will go for the simplest explanation—even when cursory observation will reveal that an image is the result of complexity and artifice.

Case in point: Black Glass (shown above) seems to be a photo of glassware captured on a mirror that reflects a perfectly black background. However, this is by no means the case. The composition was shot using a mirror with a white background, as you can see here (the image is shown as shot towards the bottom of the HDR is Technique, Not Style article).

Given that the image was shot on a white background, how did I achieve this version? Answer: In post-production I swapped the luminosity information. A little more technically, in Photoshop I converted to the LAB color space, selected the L-channel, and applied an Invert adjustment.

The interesting thing is that this inverted the glass itself as well as the background. So, in the image above, the eye thinks it is seeing glassware. But if you compare this version to the original you’ll see that it is actually rendering the negative space created by the outlines of the glassware rather than the glass itself!

Here’s another example: take this shot of a wave I made on Point Reyes, California during a workshop I was leading:

At a casual glance, this photo looks simply like a breaking wave. If you look a little longer, though, the sense of scale becomes extremely peculiar because the line in the foreground appears to be a perfectly normal wave. If the foreground wave is normal size, then just how huge is the crashing, splashing wave that is the main subject of the photo?

The answer, of course, has to do with photographic perspective, and the illusion of perspective. I shot this photo with a long telephoto lens (450mm in 35mm terms) lying down in the sand on the beach. But that is not what the eye sees, and in this case it is what the eye doesn’t see that makes the image both perplexing and interesting.

Related story: Impossible Images.

Posted in Bemusements, Photography, Writing

Self-Portrait in Faucet

December 9, 2011 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

We’ve had a spate of minor—but surprisingly expensive—plumbing repairs recently. I took advantage of one of these to shoot our new kitchen faucet with my 200mm macro lens. Who knew I’d end up with a self-portrait?

Probably all artists have some degree of narcissism, although I do try to keep mine in check. The kids work well to counterbalance any such tendencies. But I do enjoy making self-portraits—here’s my Self-Portrait with Moustache, to some extent in homage to Dali.

Getting back to plumbing, it’s amazing what one can find in one’s fixtures besides oneself. In this image, Darth Vador seems to have made an unexpected appearance. May the faucet be with you!

Related images: for a different take on plumbing (not ours!) see Plumbing, and Couch (plumbing image at the bottom of the story); you also might like an image of a Swim Ladder that is both HDR and hyperfocal.

Posted in Bemusements, Photography

Berkeley Pier in HDR

December 8, 2011 by Harold Davis | Leave a comment

This is an HDR image of the Berkeley Pier, the site of the Free Walk-and-Talk with Harold Davis on Saturday, December 17 at 4:00PM. Please consider joining us.

Exposure data: 90mm, seven exposures at shutter speeds from 1/250 of a second to 1.6 seconds; each exposure at f/11 and ISO 200, tripod mounted; exposures combined in Photoshop using Nik HDR Efex Pro and hand-layering.

I thought the birds on the lamps were cool, but one bird was missing so I had to paint it in. Can you tell which one?

Also coming up this week: Free Webcast: Creative Flower Photography on Thursday, December 15 at 10AM PT (sponsored by O’Reilly Media).

Posted in HDR, Photography, San Francisco Area