Photoblog 2.0

Blue Mask, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: A series of LAB color inversions turns the mask blue and the masked model a variety of exotic colors.

Ghost, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Originally, this was a pretty typical studio shot of Christianna. I shot this model on a white seamless background using studio lighting with the boys from San Jose.

In Photoshop, I converted the image to the LAB color space. Next, I inverted the L channel. This turned the white background black, Christianna’s dark hair mostly white, her black underwear white, and so on.

I think the overall effect is somewhat dramatic and ghostly, and I plan to try it again.

Wild Turkey, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Hiking down to Tennessee Beach with Mark we came across this wild turkey.

It’s the time of year for turkeys to strut their manly stuff. This dude was inflating and puffing out his feathers, totally showing off for the three nearby females.

The gals for their part were doing their best to pretend to ignore him. I could see, however, an occassional glance at him when one of them thought he wasn’t looking.

The whole scene was palpably human with its affectations of cool and dance of interest/disinterest. After witnessing this I may have to go for Tofurky come Thanksgiving.

Exposure data: 200mm, 1/250 of a second at f/8 and ISO 200, hand held.

Waiting, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

My Mom came back from giving a workshop in Guatemala. Late last night found me at SFO to pick her up.

Waiting. The plane was late. Next, the wait for luggage. Not Godot, luggage.

I was bored so I snapped this distorted photo of the carousel using my Lensbaby Composer with the fisheye optic, at 1/15 of second using the f/5.6 aperture ring and ISO 100, hand held. Waiting for luggage, or Godot—whichever comes first—with a fisheye lens.

Courtyard, photo by Harold Davis.

For a preview of my upcoming Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques check out Converting to Black & White, the most recent column in my Creativity in the Photoshop Darkroom series on Photo.net.

About this image: This is an HDR capture, created using combined exposures in Photomatix, and converted to monochromatic. There were six original exposures at 12mm, shutter speeds from 1/250 of a second to 1/25 of a second, each exposure at f/14 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

My idea with this black and white HDR image of an old courtyard in Havana, Cuba was to challenge the usual assumptions about framing an architectural photo. When you realize that the camera was positioned at the bottom of a courtyard, it’s easy to see you are looking up at the sky. However, at a glance the nearly square patch of sky and cloud could also be a framed work of art on the wall.

As I’ve noted, converting your Photomatix HDR to black and white means never having to apologize again for garish colors.

Coiled, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Bondage, as practiced in the plant kingdom, can be an involuntary affair. A Passiflora vine makes beautiful flowers, but it is surely an agressor without conscience. Left to its own devices, spring-boarding with coiled energy, it will tie and knot to everything and anything, killing neighbors. The only way to get this territorial imperialist to let go is to cut it free.

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All shots with 200mm macro lens, 36mm extension tube, tripod mounted.

Life Is Full of Beauty, photo by Harold Davis.

In David Lynch’s wonderfully creepy classic film Blue Velvet you know you’ve entered an alternative and not altogether wholesame nether world when severed body parts start appearing at macro level in the grass.

In the Blue Velvet spirit, I am offering a prize to the first person to correctly identify the disembodied (so to speak) body part in this “wholesome” photo of water drops on two blades of grass. Please specify the body part, where in the photo it is to be found, and provide a theory as to whom it belongs. You can enter your guess or opinion as a comment on this blog story, or send me an email. I will be the sole judge as to accuracy and general craziness of any such submission.

The prize is a free copy of my new book Creative Black & White, shipped when it is available.

Infrared Alice, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a capture of Alice using a camera retrofitted to only shoot IR.

Rendition of colors (or black and whites in this case) is quite odd using IR and seems to depend on the light source—studio strobe lighting in this capture. If you look at my shots of Alice by visible light you’ll see that her eyes are light blue (not black as in the IR capture) and that her underwear is opaque black, not the slightly transparent taupe that her bra and panties appear to be under IR.

Some other infrared model shots: Infrared Portrait; Dream; Christianna.

There’s a section explaining black and white infrared (IR) photography in my forthcoming book Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Technques.

Hood Ornament, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I don’t think I’d want one of these in my belly button, but on this model it creates a pretty interesting landscape.

A Matter of Perspective, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This image is a trick because the convergence of lines depicted is not possible as a matter of perspective. Yet the image is apparently plausible. Can you spot how I pulled it off?

More about my impossible images; La Vie En Rose; my Impossible set on Flickr.

Mare Island Night Photo Shoot, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This light painting extravaganza took place during my night photography shoot on Mare Island sponsored by Renegade. The big impact of relatively small lights at night has to be seen to be believed. This was great fun, and a great group of shooters.

More Mare Island.

Seven Peaches, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I like the comment on Flickr, where I originally posted this photo a few months back: “Yep…seven. I checked.”

Let’s hear it for literalism, an often overlooked and powerful way of thinking that goes against the prevailing tide of metaphoric mysticism that tends to inform art and photography!

I photographed the seven peaches on my garage floor using natural light with a white board to bounce some extra light into the peaches using my Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro lens at 1/20 of a second and f/11, ISO 100, tripod mounted. For once, there’s very little post-processing here.

Won Ton, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a close-up of a won ton dumpling with particularly nice folds in the dough from the take-in Chinese meal that helped celebrate my recent birthday.

The point of the photo is that often the specifics of what you are photographing don’t matter that much. I bet you didn’t know this was a dumpling until I said so, anymore than you could know the subject of Plumbing without the title.

Also, this is a model that is good enough to eat, quite literally.

Porcelain Series No. 1, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

For my first post of the new year, I’ll note that things are often not what they seem. Some images are worth a second look. And furthermore, it’s one of the jobs of photography to prod, jolt or cajole the unsuspecting viewer into taking that second look.

This might be an image of female body parts, but in fact it is the plumbing on the underside of a toilet found at Urban Ore, a place that specializes is recycling. Shot with my 85mm macro at f/64 on a bright, overcast recent day.

La Vie En Rose, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

If you look at this Photoshop composite, the building blocks I used to create it may not be immediately apparent. Some viewers have thought apple peels, others have suggested a shell, combined with an ornate column.

Astute readers of this blog will recognize Straight Shot (in a color version) combined with the variegated rose in Curves (turned on its side). Creating a complex composite like this one in Photoshop reminds me of nothing so much as doodling—perhaps proving that those painful years in graduate school were not entirely wasted!