Photoblog 2.0

Alstroemeria Medley, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I shot these alstroemeria blossoms (Peruvian Lilies) on a lightbox. I combined seven exposures at shutters speeds ranging from 1/4 of a second to 5 seconds. Each exposure was shot at f/64 and ISO 100, all were (of course) tripod mounted with great care taken not to move the camera between exposures. I used my 85mm perspective correcting macro lens.

I used layers and masking in Photoshop to combined the exposures. The hand-HDR process was biased towards overexposure because this tends to emphasize transparency.

The black background was accomplished with a LAB channel inversion. You’ll find this technique explained briefly on my blog and in greater detail in The Photoshop Darkroom.

Overall, I think the result looks much more like a painting than a photograph—a good thing in this case.

Related stories: Meditations on Transparency; Cherry Medley; Poppies En Masse.

Kiss from a Rose, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The lighting, photography, and post-processing of this image all had the same goal: to increase saturation and tonal contrast and create a kind of “Georgia O’Keefe” effect. This is a set of techniques I’ve already used in my Variegated Rose (shown at the top of Photoshop Credo).

Lighting: I positioned the rose (a cut flower) so the light source (in this case the sun) went obliquely across the top of the flower so it created deep shadows. I controlled the shadows by positioning some sticks in front of the flower to selectively deepen the shadows.

Exposure: I used the tripod collar on a telephoto macro to mount the lens on the tripod, and pointed my camera-lens-extension-tube rig straight down on the rose. I used a magnifying eye piece for precision focus.

I combined three versions exposed at different shutter speeds to create the version shown, but all the versions were biased towards underexposure.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens, 24mm extension tube, 3 combined exposures at 1/2 second, 1 second and 2 seconds, each exposure at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

Post-Processing: As noted, I started by combining three captures using layers and masking to increase the tonal range of the composition. After collapsing the composite, I cleaned it up—it’s amazing how little “gribblies” tend to show up in extreme macros.

Next, I combined the background rose layer with itself twice, using Multiply and Screen Blending modes—once again with the idea of increasing contrast and tonal range. Layers and masks controlled the scope of the effect to specific areas.

I used two of the Nik filters from Color Efex Pro in my next pass—Glamour Glow and Tonal Contrast—to further my goals of enhancing both contrast and saturation in a selective and attractive way.

The most important Photoshop move meant converting the image to LAB color, and blending it selectively (using Normal and Soft Light modes) with an Equalization of the AB channels of a duplicate version of the image.

You’ll find more about my flower photography techniques in Creative Close-Ups: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques and more about my post-processing ideas and workflow in The Photoshop Darkroom: Creative Digital Post-Processing.

Needless to say, this level of Photoshop work in a house teeming with kids over Christmas break requires a good set of headphones and some great music—in this case Rosanne Cash’s The List.

Remembrance of Things Past, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a high-key image, in the sense that it is predominantly overexposed from the perspective of a smack-dab-in-the-middle “proper” exposure histogram. In other words, the exposure histogram is right-biased to a considerable degree.

In addition, the photograph features a largely white background, typical of high-key imagery.

When shooting something like this, I bracket like crazy—so I have a number of choices when I process the RAW captures. I can even pick and choose passages from several of the bracketed exposures if it seems like a good idea (it did not in this case).

When I started to process the photo, I considered adding some detail to the shadow “flower”—but everything I tried seemed a bit hokey. So I left the shadow of the flower as what it is, an undifferentiated flower.

This is not a glamour photo of a fresh-cut flower in an elegant crystal vase. The Gerbera is shown below photographed against black in the callow days of its youth.

The flower is past its prime and has already lived a full life. The point of the photo for me is the association of the shadow with memories—so the photo has a spare, elegant, and nostalgic feeling. Appropriate as we face the waning of the year and the dawn of a new decade.

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

Here’s another, somewhat softer version of my variegated rose.

Structure of Rose, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

As flowers go, roses tend to present interesting three-dimensional curvilinear spaces. Looking head-on at a rose is different in scale but otherwise similar to an aerial view of badlands or canyon country.

I picked both roses out at a local florist, and used bright, but overcast sunlight. There was a blind on the window so I could control the intensity of the light.

Both photos are examples of hand-HDR and flower photography—I combined multiple captures at different exposures using layers and masking in Photoshop to create each final image.

Some other images showing roses and their structure: Rose Spiral; Rose Studies; Burning White Rose; Red Rose Heart.

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Echinacea Pink Double Delight, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Flower macros are a personal subject that I return to over and over again with great joy. The photo above is an Echinacea Pink Double Delight that I photographed just after a recent rainstorm.

The daffodil in the sunshine (below) is from early 2008. I found the RAW file recently when flipping through my archives, and decided to have some fun converting this simple, sunny image.

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Dahlia in Decay, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Like people, flowers are beautiful even when imperfect. Perhaps particularly when they are imperfect. If you search for a perfect version of a flower or a person, then you substitute shallowness and ephemeral beauty for true depth.

Here’s the story of how I came to first photograph this White Dahlia, and a second version, Ghost Flower. The flower you see here is several days older than the earlier versions. Resurrection is an earlier take on the same theme, involving poppies rather than a Dahlia.

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

The monochrome White Dahlia came from a color image. A high key color image, and one that didn’t have much in the way of contrasting colors. Which is what made it so ripe for black and white conversion.

I started back at the color image before black and white, which was itself a blended version of six captures. (Here’s the story.)

To create this version, I used duplicate images converted to LAB color, and hit with an Inversion or Equalization adjustment on a specific channel. I then copied the transformed version back over the original, blending in a variety of modes.

For example, using the Difference blending mode largely accounts for the soft, transparent look in some of the petals. (Minor technical note, you can’t use Difference blending in LAB color.)

The whole thing became a stack of 35 layers. Eeek! This process is explained in extremely gory detail in the major case study in the final part of The Photoshop Darkroom: Creative Digital Post-Processing.

Julian wandered past my computer at about this point, and I asked him what I should call the image. He suggested my title, “Ghost Flower.” What are kids for if they can’t give you good titles for your work? Just kidding.

This image has raised the question, “Is this a straight shot or a process?”

I get much the same query when I give workshops, often in the form, “Has this been Photoshopped or is it straight?”

Like Molly Bloom, my answer is always, “Yes.” I have no shame about using Photoshop, and it is integral to all my images, some more than others. The point of a photo like “Ghost Flower” is the way it looks and the emotions it arouses, not how it was made.

Full disclosure: Per the new F.T.C. regulations, I am using Photoshop CS4 for free courtesy of Adobe Software.

White Dahlia, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I wasn’t planning to photograph any more flowers yesterday. Between kids and work things had been hectic indeed. But when I saw the white Dahlia in a bucket outside a florist, I knew I had to possess its soul. Otherwise known as, photograph the flower.

This particular white Dahlia was not perfect. In the sense that it had obvious flaws. But I could deal with these. The flower had a lavish, wild, partially symmetric sensousness that called out to me.

I bought the stem for $2.50 from the florist, and I wouldn’t let him doll it up with the kind of ugly decorative grass that florists tend to use across all varieties of flora. Putting lipstick on a pig is an act of futility. It also hurts to diminish something of pure beauty by adding unbecoming and unnecessary decoration.

I cut the flower off the stem. Oh, how we hurt the ones we love! Next, I photographed straight down on a light box.

For this image I made a total of six exposures using my 85mm macro, all at an adjusted aperture of f/64 and ISO 100. Exposure times ranged from 2 seconds to 30 seconds. The exposures all were “over exposed” by the histogram, and tended towards the high-key on a white background.

I combined the captures in Adobe Photoshop CS4 using layers and masks. The inital RAW conversion included 10 layers.

After “smooshing” the layers down (now, there’s a technical term for you!), I converted to the LAB color space. I duplicated the image, and used an inversion of the L channel to create a black background. Then I copied the original image over the L-inverted copy at varying transparencies. This helped to create a soft, semi-transparent effect in the petals.

I could see this was an essentially black & white image, so I decided to formally convert to black & white. I used my favorite technique of duplicating the background, using a CS4 b&w adjustment layer, selectively painting in areas, and repeating the process with different b&w adjustment layer settings.

The image seemed to need something more, so I duplicated a flattened version, and put it through Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro. The Silver Efex “Complex Structure” mode added what I was looking for, and I selectively painted areas back over the adjustment layer version using this effect.

The final addition of sepia toning at low opacity was accomplished both in Photoshop and using one of the Silver Efex sepia toning effects.

Oh yeah, full disclosure: According to the F.T.C. regulations that take effect December 1, I should note that I am using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro as a freebie professional courtesy. While I’m at it, I might as well note that I am using Photoshop CS4 for free thanks to Adobe Software.

Echinacea purpurea Hope, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This photo shows a Coneflower, Echinacea purpurea ‘Hope’. This a patented hybrid, with a portion of each sale donated by the wholesale growers to the Susan G. Komen For the Cure, a leading organization in the fight against breast cancer.

I’ve been growing exotic hybridized Echinacea to photograph. There’s no way you can get these at a florist, so to photograph them I needed to cultivate them. This was one of my first nice specimens, picked just before the onset of autumn rains.

I photographed the flower using a black velvet background, and bright but overcast daylight from the front and side. The finished image combines 4 captures at shutter speeds from 6 to 30 seconds. Here’s the full exposure data: Nikon D300, 85mm perspective-correcting macro, 4 exposures (6 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds) combined in Photoshop, each exposure at f/64 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

Driving Nicky and Mathew to school this morning in the pouring rain I half-turned to Mathew, and said, “I love you.”

Five-year-old Mathew replied, “I know, Dad.”

I didn’t want to make Nicky feel left out, so I said, “I love you, Nicky.”

“I know, Dad.”

Compared to the vast feeling of love in my heart for these boys this seemed a bit too routine for me. I felt the need to add, “That’s good. It’s important to know you are loved by your father.”

Mathew: “You’re not ‘father.’ You are ‘Dad.’”

Puts me in my place.

Becoming Echinacea 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

When I saw this Echinacea bud, I knew the image would have to be black and white because the flower was still an entirely monochromatic green. Spectacular colors would come later in the flower’s life.

I photographed the Echinacea in early evening with my 85mm macro lens and a 36mm extension tube for 1/2 second exposure at f/16 and ISO 200. I tried some longer exposures as well, with the lens fully stopped down, but there was always some slight movement to ruin the sharpness.

In Photoshop, I created three different color versions using LAB color before using adjustment layers to convert to black and white.

The version at the beginning of this story is based on an Equalization adjustment to the L channel. I like it best of the three.

The version below is pretty close to normally processed. The version far below is based on an Inversion adjustment applied to the L channel.

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Smart Weed, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

However strong the walls they build, there are always cracks. Freedom is like a weed—in this case Polyganum, also called smart weed. It’s invasive, and will root anywhere, like in this crack in my stucco garden wall.

A story on my floral photography aired recently on local public TV. Here’s the segment:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Here’s a link to the story on the web: http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/your-photos-on-quest-harold-davis.

Here’s the description of the segment:

East Bay photographer Harold Davis combines his loves of the natural world with modern digital photography to create images that show the ordinary in an extra-ordinary way. After many years as a commercial photographer, he decided to move back to the Bay Area and change his focus. QUEST joined Harold at the Davis family home in his garden, for a morning photo-session with his floral “models.”

Nigella Recto, photo by Harold Davis.

This is the front and back (recto above, and verso below) of a small flower with an incredibly complex structure, a Negilla. The common name, which should be said mit feeling, is Love-in-the-mist.

I had absolutely no idea of photographing this flower from the back. But after photographing the front from the top down, I turned the flower over and saw that underneath it was more colorful, and even more complex, than from the front.

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By the way, you may be interested to see some of my work for sale, reproduced on canvas, as giclee prints on photo paper, or as giclee prints on Arch paper at PosterCartel.

Simple Poppy, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a simple Papaver Rhoeas, photographed with an unvarnished macro lens for depth-of-field. The flower may be simple, and the idea behind the image straightforward, but the context wasn’t either: I was talking with several people, and answering questions with “sound bites” for an audio recording as I composed and exposed this flower image in my garden.