Photoblog 2.0

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.]

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.