Photoblog 2.0

Katie’s Hand, photo by Harold Davis. View this photo larger.

Katie’s hands are tiny, mobile, expressive, and elegant. Each hand is a perfectly formed minature. Katie Rose gesticulates with her hands. She spreads them out in front of her in a classic preemie gesture when the stimulus is too much, balls them up, and them spreads them again. I love these hands of Katie.

When we visited Katie in the NICU today her weight was up 15 grams to 945 grams, approaching the magical 1 kilo benchmark. One day at a time, knock on wood, all is going well.

Day Lily in Morning Dew, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In the early morning, in a shady nook in my garden, I found this day lily in the morning dew.

At the close macro range of this photo, it’s hard to get all the flower in focus even with the lens fully stopped down. So I combined six different captures in Photoshop. Each capture had a different point of focus.

I’ve dubbed this technique HFR. You can read more about the technique, and see other examples, in High Focal Range (HFR), Red Flowering Dogwood Blossom, and Gaillardia x grandiflora. Overall, if done right, you can use this technique to get a subtle three dimensional effect, but not so 3-D that it is disturbing in the way those 3-D spectacles in the movies were.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, six captures combined in Photoshop, each capture using a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds at f/40 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Suprada Urval has started a series of weekly interviews with photographers on her blog. I am her third interview subject. My interview covers a wide range of topics from how I got started in photography through night photography and more.

I’ve never been asked about my image titles before. Suprada’s question made me stop and think:

SU: How do you come up with such beautiful names for your photographs? I am in love with some of the titles in your “Digital Night” series. Names like “Estero by Starlight”, “Renegade Remaining Photons”, “Star Light Star Bright”, “Moon Glyph”, “Beauty in the Belly of the Beast” are quite fascinating. Are these inspired by song names? or Sci-fi ?

My answer (in part): “When I understand the essence of a photo—why I have photographed it, and what is important about the subject of the photo—then the titles seem to flow naturally for me. Telling the truth about what something is by naming it has great power. My sources do range from poetry to popular music to literature to scientific writing.”

View this photo larger. Read the back story featuring this image.

Gladiolus 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

There’s a clump of these wonderful gladiolas that grow in my garden this time of year. I cut this stem, and photographed it in a dark room on black. The only light source was an LED headlamp that I used to “paint” with light to illuminate the flower. The trick with this kind of light painting is to never linger too long on any one spot.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, 5 seconds at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Katie Froggie, photo by Harold Davis. View this photo larger.

Katie Rose continues to do well. She is our literal miracle. Knock on wood.

Katie likes to sleep on her tummy. When we visited Katie today, she looked like a little human frog to us.

I got to kangaroo Katie again today. While she was snoozing on my chest I took a nap, too.

Iris Panel, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A clump of irises in my garden have the wonderful variegated stems you see in this photo. I wanted to photograph them while they were in their prime, but the background was messy and wouldn’t work. So I threw a large black cloth behind the flowers to use as a backdrop.

I knew when I planned my exposures that I would be underexposing for the background, and then lightening the flowers and foliage. So I started with a substantial under exposure at 1/4 of a second, and layered on top elements from a one second and from a two second exposure.

The original of this image was a vertical shot. As I was processing the image in Photoshop, I was reminded of a Japanese Shoji screen. To emphasize the resemblence to a screen, or panel, I duplicated the image, flipped it horizontally, and added it to the original to create a new horizontal image.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR lens at 36mm (54mm in 35mm terms) with image stabilization turned off, circular polarizer, three exposures between 1/4 of a second and 2 seconds at f/29 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]