Photoblog 2.0

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.]

Great Basin Spadefoot, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The good people at the Kanab Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management collected this fellow when he was merely a tadpole from a rain puddle in the slickrock. Now this Great Basin Spadefoot Frog lives in a terrarium in the office.

When I visted the BLM following my visit to the Wave, they were nice enough to take the little guy out for me where I photographed him on a hand. He’s a shy one, so I didn’t have too much time. I put my 200mm macro lens on a tripod, and boosted the ISO to 1,000 to use available light.

Roof, photo by Harold Davis.

Phyllis and I left the kids with Rachel this afternoon, and we went to visit the De Young Museum in San Francisco. This is a photo of the vast and wonderful roof of the new museum building from the observation tower. I used my Canon Powershot G9 “toy” camera (I never could have brought my backpack full of gear and tripod into the museum).

My Three Suns, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The sun in this photo framing the tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, and, for that matter, all suns in the photo other than the real sun, are caused by an optical phenomenon called double refraction. (Double refraction is also called birefringence).

In double refraction, each ray of light separates into two rays (the “ordinary” ray and the “extraordinary” ray) when the light heads through the lens. The extra suns are in my photo caused by the extraordinary rays. The birefringence effect is dependent on how the light is polarized.

Normally, you’d want to avoid something like double refraction in your photos (although, avoid as much as can, you’ll likely see some if you shoot directly into the sun with a long lens as I did in this photo).

But last night I was feeling bored, and I knew I had more than enough photos in my files for my Golden Gate project, so I amplified the effect by adding a polarizing filter in front of my lens, and rotating the outer ring of the filter to change the direction of polarization until the subsidiary “sun” was in position.

[375mm in 35mm terms, circular polarizer, 1/750 of a second at f/9 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Boy in a Box, photo by Harold Davis.

How time flies! Lo and behold, the babe in a basket has transmogrified into a boy in a box!

I photographed our Mathew Gabriel in the box at ISO 800 using my Canon G9, and then post-processed for noise reduction.

Heads Up Heads Down, photo by Harold Davis. View this image large.

The Marin County marsh behind the shopping mall in Corte Madera was filled with water birds. Phyllis took Julian into the mall for a little shopping, with the promise to pick me up when they were done. I wandered round the fringes of the marsh, photographed these pelicans, and lusted for the new 500mm Nikon VR lens.

Happy Frog, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This happy frog is a mosaic detail from the wonderful “magic stairway” at 16th Ave and Moraga in San Francisco.

[105mm f/2.8 macro lens, 157.5mm in 35mm terms, 1/15 of a second at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Shadow of the Past, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a close-up of the shadow of an old ranch fence on the barn at Sea Ranch.

Shadows interest me because a shadow usually displays more contrast than the object creating the shadow. The great dynamic range between a shadow and the background on which the shadow is projected can be used to create interesting compositional effects.

Related images: Bridge Shadow, Papaver and Shadow, Blind Shadow, Shadows on a Wall.

[105mm, 157.5mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 1/4 of a second at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Wave Game, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I played a game with the waves on Stinson Beach. I positioned my tripod below the tide line and tried to capture the movement of the waves. The waves tried to make me grab camera and tripod and run from the spot.

A great way to start thinking about vacation.

Related stories: Wave Toss, Surf.

Feral Turkey Feather, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

It’s not unusual to see wild turkeys in the Berkeley hills. Actually, these turkeys aren’t wild: they are feral, animals that were domesticated and then reverted to a wild state.

This is a capture of a feather we found from one of these feral turkeys taken through a Zeiss microscope I’ve been experimenting and playing with.

Cloud Catcher, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

We hadn’t been to the Albany Waterfront Trail for a while, so Julian and I went exploring. This area was a landfill and dump until it was made into a park. Artists came along and did their transformative thing. Now the bushes are growing back and the trash as well as the art is partly hidden. Julian and I thought this sculpture looked like she was catching clouds.

Far Country, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I photographed these stanchions on a pier at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Yesterday I set out to make an infinite progression of the stanchions. Somewhat like the endless doorways in World without End or the stair without end in Endless Stair.

But the lines of perspective didn’t really work. So I flipped the image this way and that, and noodled and doodled the afternoon away.

Castle Cake, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Phyllis made this castle cake for Julian’s tenth birthday party using a mold she got from King Arthur Flour. The cake is in a grand tradition that includes Faulty Towers Cake, Herbie-the-Love-Bug cake, and (unpictured) dragon cakes, dinosaur cakes, fantasy cakes, Thomas cakes, and much more.

Related stories: Blowing out the Candles, Nicky and the Chocolate Sandwich, Peering at the Golden Gate, Flowr Pie.

Serpent Mother, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Matt and Amy and their kids came down from Placerville to go to the Fire Arts Festival at The Crucible in Oakland. After a nice dinner, Julian and I joined them at the festival.

It was great to see so many people being creative and having fun, well, just for the fun of it. I decided to see how well my long exposure digital night techniques would work on the fire creatures.

Julian and my favorite was the Serpent Mother by the Flowering Lotus Girls, shown above before full night and below with a BART train and (far below) in flames with the Serpent Mom’s egg.

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