Photoblog 2.0

Shaving Spirals, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: a photo composite created from the shavings left after sharpening a pencil.

Pencil Shaving I, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The shavings from a sharpened pencil, shown above and below, were almost discarded, but made an interesting pattern.

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A little moisture made the shavings slightly transparent, and I photographed them on a light box for transparency using my 200mm macro lens augmented with a 36mm extension tube.

I couldn’t resist inverting the images and extending the spiral in Photoshop. This one really needs to be seen larger.

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More Grills Gone Wild, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In case the first Grills Gone Wild wasn’t enough…

Eye Study 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I keep trying to emulate Escher’s Eye. Which, as I might have expected, is harder than meets the, er, eye.

By the way, this lovely eye, sans the flower or skull, belongs to “Big Katie.” Who is only “big” in comparison to our little Katie Rose, whom she is helping us take care of this summer.

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

On Saturday I took Julian to the Classic Car Show on the Tiburon waterfront. It was lots of fun, and I enjoyed photographing the patterns and reflections in some of these chrome monsters, er, beautiful old machines. I wouldn’t be too surprised if I come up with some abstractions from the reflections when I have the time!

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Self Portrait, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Inspired by Eye, a mezzotint by M.C. Escher, I created this self portrait with purple Clematis blossoms reflected in my eyes.

Phyllis persuaded me to put a flower rather than a skull in my pupils. You do have to look at the image in a larger size to see the flower.

Pinhole, photo by Harold Davis.

I took this photo of the Golden Gate with the pinhole plate attachment that is part of the Lensbaby Composer Optic Swap System. The effective aperture was f/177 (well, a pinhole is a very little thing!), and the exposure time at ISO 200 was 6/10 of a second, tripod mounted. Here’s the color version:

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It’s amusing to think that I went to some trouble to turn my relatively expensive DSLR into a toy camera with literally no optics—a pinhole is just that, a hole the size of a pin. But having interesting and unusual choices to play with, like those provided by the Lensbaby Composer and its Optic Swap System, is fun and a spur to creative visual thinking.

Other recent Lensbaby Composer images: Absence of Color; Calypso Orchids; Zebra & Jaguar; Portrait of Nicky; Hello, World.

1959 Jaguar XK150, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I was lucky the other day to get to photograph Victor Garlin’s magnificent vintage 1959 Jaguar XK150 Convertible. I’m looking forward to working on some abstractions and macro views of this wonderful machine when I get the chance.

Storm Surge, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This photo composite comes from LAB inversions of a channel of Poppy Medley, LAB inversion of a channel of Breaking Wave that was a by-product of the black and white conversion, and Sunset.

I often file and save channels that look interesting to me as I do my LAB channel operations. If these are not immediately useful, I find that they can be great fun to play with later on.

Coming out of Zion with kids still coated in sand from Coral Pink Sand Dunes I polled the troops. Perhaps it was the mention of being careful about rattlesnakes when camping in Nevada, but somehow the boys seemed very enthusiastic about a resort hotel with a swimming pool.

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It’s amazing how you can find connectivity almost anywhere these days. I got out my laptop, and within a few minutes had located a promotional deal for the Wynn Casino in Vegas, which promised not one, not two, not three, but five swimming pools (with the neighboring Encore property thrown in).

We rolled into Vegas like country bumpkins, the ark stuffed with sand, crumbs, and camping gear. Vegas is not my favorite place, and it was weird marching across the casino floor kids in tow.

Up on the thirty-fourth floor, our room had a view (above and below), as well as plush beds and a bathtub that could have been swimming pool number six. Valet service had delivered our gear to the room while we checked in. All in all, not half bad.

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As I’ve said, I’m not a Vegas fan, which should come as no great revelation to anyone who knows me, or reads my blog. But it was fun being there with the kids because they enjoyed it so much. The pirate show at Treasure Island was a big hit with them because “actual blank” canon balls were fired (the undulating boot-and-bikini clad sirens of Treasure Island weren’t even noticed). Ah, innocence!

Coming back into the casino floor lobby of the Wynn through a maze and gallery of ridculously conspicuous and vulgar overconsumption, Julian asked me, “Dad, how long would this place last if they turned the power and water off?”

“Probably the desert would be sifting through here in less than twenty years.”

“But Dad, would they still be playing poker at that table in the corner?”

I think Julian got the place. The truth is, they were nice to us, and didn’t bat an eye at our obvious ungambling and unspending ways. Having the boys with me helped me to see how many people do enjoy the place, as artificial as it is.

Later on, with boys tucked in, I went out and photographed Vegas at night. My idea with the gondola photo (below) was to make the exposure long enough so the boat in motion blurred, so I stopped the lens down to f/22 so that a ten second exposure was viable.

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Lensbaby Baby, photo by Harold Davis.

Dear World,

My Dad likes to photograph me with all kinds of weird lenses, first the fisheye and now this Lensbaby Composer with a plastic lens. Dad says he switched in a plastic lens, and trained the “sweet spot” on my eyes so that they are in focus and the background blurred. What are you going to do when your father is a photographer? Sometimes he gets into Photoshop and makes me look like an old painting. I think that’s funny.

Anyway, World, here I come! My Dad has taken me to playgrounds for the first time, and I’ve met girls my own age named Ingrid and Samantha. Dad can’t resist telling their moms the story of my birth, how small I was when I was born, and how I beat the odds. Dad says they gave me a “low single digit percentage chance” and that I am a true miracle.

So I say, World, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Here comes Katie Rose!

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

This is the ground floor of the Coastguard Boathouse on the western tip of Point Reyes. I’ll be giving a night photography workshop in this building in a couple of weeks. We’ll eat our meals looking at this boat. I hope the weather cooperates for good night photography!

Eye Colorado, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a view of the Navajo Bridge over the Colorado River near Lee’s Ferry in Arizona. When you put in at Lee’s Ferry, going under the Navajo Bridge is the last sight of civilization before the Colorado sinks through geologic eras into its great canyon.

I love the old steel girder bridges over some of the chasms in the west, like this one and the bridge over the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

Abstractly, the shapes in this composition remind me of an eye, perhaps turned on its side.

This is a photo of me when I was two or three. I can’t track down my age any more precisely, or the location, although it is likely to be Princeton, New Jersey; Davis, California; or Columbus, Ohio (my parents moved around when I was little).

It’s amazing to me how much I look in the photo like my youngest son Mathew. However, in the later photo below I look more like my second son Nicky.

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I think the triptych was taken for my first passport. If so, it would make me seven or eight.

Memory fades. As do photos. Surprisingly, old photos can help us reclaim our stories by reminding us where we started. I enjoying scanning these snapshots and working on the scans, and when I get the chance I’ll go through more of my old print archives.

Here I am more recently:

Wall at Arcosanti, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Our first stop in the Davis ark was, appropriately enough, Arcosanti. Founded by architect Paolo Soleri, now in his nineties, Arcosanti is an exercise in community building that combines architecture with ecology, located in the Arizona desert.

We sampled the baked goods at the cafe, inspected Soleri bells, and went on the tour. Under some of the big arcs I photographed the wall painting shown, slightly worse (or better) for weather. Then Nicky got tired of the tour, and we turned around and got back in the ark.