Photoblog 2.0

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

This story is going to be one big whine about Hearst Castle as an abomination of an ersatz tourist trap and a monument of hagiography of a capitalistic pig paid for with public money. But before I get to the ranting, let me explain the photographic problem that the two images that go along with this story illustrate. If you are interested only in photography, feel free to skip the whining.

When you get on the tourist bus up to the castle, they make it very clear that you can’t use flash, you can’t use a tripod, and you can’t bring a bag of gear with you. Most of the interior spaces of the castle are pretty dark. So what’s a photographer to do?

I decided to see if I could use high ISO photography for something besides a fish tank. I set my D300 to ISO 6400, and left it there. The photo above shows the inside of one of Heart’s swimming pools at ISO 6400, 1/125 of a second, and f/5.6. Perfectly reasonable for hand holding, and the noise adds a nice Venetian effect to go with the overly decorative swimming pool.

The photo below shows the shadows of the tasseled chairs in the baronial dining room. This was the kind of dining room that served ketchup and condiments out of the jars along with ranch food and baroque table settings. William Randolph Hearst’s rear end probably sat in one of the chairs whose shadows are shown in this photo.

I wanted plenty of depth of field. This is a situation that would have called for a tripod. Instead, at ISO 6400 I handheld for a 1/50 of a second at f/32 exposure.

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Warning: here comes the whining and ranting. I almost don’t know where to start. So let’s start with the place itself. There are some wonderful decorative touches by architect Julia Morgan, who put bread on her table with Hearst Castle for more than twenty years. But despite tour guide and widescreen-big-movie-that-comes-with-the-admission-ticket-and-you-have-to-sit-and-see-even-on-a-beautiful-day-particularly-if-you-are-traveling-with-kids claims that this building somehow exemplifies Spanish and Italian vernacular religious architecture, the only thing Hearst castle exemplifies is gaudy and tasteless California mish-mash. In fact, Hearst Castle may have set the gold standard for ostentatious, tasteless, and awful that all other California buildings only aspire to.

My six-year-old Nicky’s complaint was down somewhat different lines: “If this is a castle, why doesn’t it have battlements?”

The Hearst family seems to have done themselves well out of this setup. They kept 35,000 acres as a private ranch and vacation retreat, and donated to the state the expensive to maintain hundred acres that the castle building sits on. Off-loading the expensive maintainence headache to the taxpayers was very slick, and it seems that as part of the deal they got sentimental tributes to the Hearst family greatness in the required film, with violin music in the background. The material does recount a bit about the great Comstock silver lode, but there is an absence of information about the (apparently hereditary) family fondness for showgirls, and no mention at all of Patty Hearst.

By the way, this isn’t a cheap place to visit. The basic tour for one adult, a six year old, and a ten year old cost $40.00.

On the crammed bus ride up the hill, along with the prohibition on flash, the recording tells one that it is OK to take photos for personal use, but they can’t be published except with written permission. This seems really unreasonable for a facility that is supported with public money, and mostly about keeping a monopoly on tourist tchatkes.

So here and now, Hearst Castle people, I’ve published these photos in my blog. I don’t have permission. Come and get me.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

May you be in love and happy with your sweetie in a most commendably non-commercial way!

This image of Hearts on Fire in the Sky is a Photoshop composite collage from almost three years ago, one of my first attempts at the genre.

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

My second oldest son Nicky likes small, cuddly things. He was definitely taken aback by the raucous fields of elephant seals, and was sitting quietly looking away from the beach. Suddenly Nicky pointed out this rabbit to me, who, to lapse into Richard Adams’s Lapine vocabulary, stayed tharn long enough for me to capture. Perhaps bunny was, like Nicky, observing the elephant seals and photographer and quietly saying regarding one and all, “Siflay hraka.”

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 200mm (300mm in 35mm terms) with image stabilization engaged, 1/160 of a second at f/6.3 and ISO 100, hand held.]

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

Yawn scratch bellow sniff rut flip bellow yawn, watching the world go by! I photographed these elephant seals on the California coast about ten miles north of Old San Simeon. (Not, as has been suggested at Ano Nuevo on the south San Mateo coast, I’ve got to get there some time.) This was on my recent road trip with my two oldest sons after the Moneterey Aquarium and before Hearst Castle.

From the viewpoint of photo composition, I didn’t know quite what to do with the vast and raucous field of elephant seals, playing fighting, pooping, and mostly lying like some awful parody of our own civilization. Looking at this scene, I felt I needed some visual counterpoint to the drab colors of the sand beach and these gigantic, weird, and wonderful beasts. When the elephant seal in this photo yawned, I was ready to capture the pink of his mouth, which together with the bird nearby makes this composition work through contrast: the eye is drawn to the pink, regardless of the activity in the rest of the photo. Only gradually does the full extent of the scene sink in. The effect is perhaps best viewed larger.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 200mm (300mm in 35mm terms) with image stabilization engaged, 1/250 of a second at f/8 and ISO 100, hand held.]

Stair Aye, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In the spirit of Arlo Guthrie’s somewhat picaresque song Alice’s Restaurant, in which a narrative about the Vietnam-era draft ostensibly starts with a tale of taking out the trash, this story behind this image starts with a bad haircut.

The haircut, and it included a dye job, belonged to my dear wife Phyllis, and the dye job was very red. As she said, the ensemble made her look like a “big strawberry.” She went back to the salon to get them to fix it, and came back looking like a “big frosted strawberry.” Normally, one should beware of using the word “big” in the context of one’s spouse on one’s blog, but I think since the phrase was hers, and considering the entire set of circumstances, which may become clearer to my readers as time goes on, I can get away with it this once.

Anyhow, getting back to the bad-dye-and-hair-cut, she had to go into San Francisco on Friday for emergency repairs, and I was her chaffeur. To pass the time while I waited, I took photos (of course!).

This image started with the roughly spiral staircase in the San Francisco General Hospital parking structure. I photographed down the well of the staircase in cloudy but bright weather using my digital fisheye lens on tripod for maximum depth of field and area coverage (this partially explains the weird converging lines and wide area of coverage).

Back home with a definitely aesthetically enhanced wife, I played in Photoshop to extend the depth and complexity of the stairs, and added an eye of a newt at the bottom of the stair well. If only I could have used Photoshop on Phyllis’s hair, I would have saved a lot of trouble.

Related images: Resistance to Spirals is Futile; Endless Stair; Spirals (Shell and Stair).

Tidepool Creature, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a close-up of a tidepool creature, taken the other day in James V Fitzgerald Marine Preserve near Moss Beach, California to the south of San Francisco. Perhaps the marine creature is a jellyfish? If you look closely you can see me and my tripod reflected in the tentacles.

[Nikon D300, 105mm f/2.8 macro lens (157.5mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, 2.5 seconds at f/40 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Resistance to Spirals Is Futile, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

There’s something hypnotizing about spirals. Even when I start with a perfectly good “straight” photo of a spiral, I feel compelled to extend the spiral in Photoshop. I guess I may as well accept that resistance to spirals is futile.

The compositing technique I used to make this image involved making both large and small copies of the original photo, pretty full explained in World without End.

Related images: Endless Stair, Spirals (shell and stair), Spirals (shell composite).

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

Monday was a school vacation in honor of the great Martin Luther King. The weather was dark and stormy. I took my older two boys, Julian and Nicky, into San Francisco to explore the (mostly interior) passages of the Hyatt atrium (below) and Embarcadero Center (above).

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Of course, I was multitasking, combining parenthood and Dad-dom with photography. My camera backpack and tripod were on my back. Like the last time I was in Embarcadero, I gravitated to the dingy spiral stairs in the dark nether regions of Embarcadero #2. (You can see some earlier versions towards the bottom of the linked story.) The stairs don’t look dark in the photo above, but they were only dimly lit on this very gray day. Amazing how this low-light subject brightens up in the face of a long digital exposure!

[Nikon D300, 10.5mm digital fisheye, 10 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Book Imposition, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This photo shows imposition proofs for my Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers. The book is due out in the next few months, published by O’Reilly, and is being printed in Italy. In the photo, these large proof sheets are laid out on our living room floor.

Each of the large sheets of paper represents a signature of 16 or 24 pages that will be bound into the final, printed book. This kind of proof is about how the pages will be ordered on press, and definitely not about color reproduction (there are other kinds of proofs that deal with color). When imposition proofs are done right (as these are), they show the printer has thought carefully about how the pages will be printed on press because images with strong color bias are located in “columns” on the same press form (each form represented by an imposition proof sheet).

Dennis Fitzgerald is the Production Editor at O’Reilly. Dennis was kind enough to bring these imposition proofs over last night in foul weather, and to be carefully and meticulously sheparding the book through the shoals of production.

Existential Escalators, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

When I was young, they warned me about the escalators. “Once you step on the escalators,” I was told, “you may never find your way off.”

But did I listen? No. The lure of the existential escalators was inevitable. And now I travel up and down forever, trapped, a ghost in the machine, the flying-Dutch-person of the moving stairs.

Related images: Endless Doors (World without End), Endless Stair.

Glass Ceiling, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I did a tour of the floor at MacWorld, and then with some time to spend before my panel at the Apple Store, what else to do in downtown San Francisco but take some photos? This one shows the surprising ceiling in the Neiman Marcus store across from Union Square.

I had my “sketch” camera, my Canon G9, with me. I’d really rather have had my full rig with tripod and a wider angle lens for this shot. Then again, I don’t know what the reaction at the store would have been if I’d tried to take complex exposures in the middle of their rotunda. With my little Canon guy I could drop to the floor and take a perfectly reasonable 12 megapixel capture, steady enough at 1/25 of a second (and f/8 for maximum depth-of-field) thanks to the in-camera image stabilization. No one even gave me a glance, although I imagine not giving anyone a glance is part of the Neiman Marcus snob appeal.

The Latin inscription in the stained glass ceiling, Fluctuat nec mergitur, means something like “Wave tossed, but unsunk.” This phrase, the motto of Paris, France, seems apt for the subject of the stained glass, a little odd for a snob department store, and definitely an appropriate way to describe my life at times.

Related image: Glow.

[Canon PowerShot G9, 7.4mm (approximately 35mm in 35mm terms), 1/25 of a second at f/8 and ISO 200, handheld using IS (image stabilization).]

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

This is a photo of the seating at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, notorious as the home of the California Golden Bears football team. The stadium straddles the Hayword earthquake fault, and is the subject of controversy between those who love groves of California oak trees and those who prefer fancy locker rooms. You can guess which side I’m on!

The other day afternoon light was wonderful. I had a Photoshop image in my mind’s eye of looking down on a stadium, with the center receding downward forever. So I decided to try my luck at Memorial Stadium.

The theme of the shoot was definitely you can’t always get what you want, but you just might get what you need, to quote the Rolling Stones. No way I was going to get a shot I could use for the basis of an infinity image like my Endless Stairs, or my Endless Doors. On the other hand, the patterns of the stairs and empty stands in the golden late afternoon light made a just swell abstract subject.

[300mm in 35mm terms, 1/160 of a second at f/6.3 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Coleoptera after Warhol, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

What can I say? Perhaps it’s just as well that Warhol came before Photoshop…

Related images: Butterfly 2, Stained Glass Bug, Coleoptera.

Alien Fresh Jerky, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a roadside business sign that provokes many questions: Was the jerky made of aliens? Were the aliens fresh? Were they so fresh they were rude? And what bright beam of a brain thought up this clear winner in the Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest business model?

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Oddly enough, when you drive the length of the barren Nevada Highway 375, the so-called Extraterrestrial Highway, long and boring, past a few outposts like Rachel, Nevada (below), coming on signs like Alien Fresh Jerky and the ET highway markers are great relief.

Even odder, there is a “real” website for Alien Fresh Jerky, and the business has a neat and tidy retail outlet going along Interstate 15 near Baker, California.

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

After photographing star trails over Yosemite Valley, I headed over Tioga Pass, and stopped to photograph sunset at the Mono Lake South Tufa area before heading across the Nevada desert towards Zion.

A photographer was working the scene on her tripod near me. We got to talking shop, as photographers usually do. It turned out she was StormyGirl, a virtual friend from the Flickr community. Well met, indeed!

[This photo: 46.5mm in 35mm terms, 2.5 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]