Category Archives: Monochrome

Eiffel Tower from Sacre Coeur Dome

By Harold Davis | Published May 18, 2013

Up about three hundred claustrophobic steps in a narrow, winding staircase lies the gallery around the exterior of the dome of the Basilica of Sacre Coeur in Montmartre. This place is anything but touristic—perhaps because to get here one has already climbed the famous stairs to Montmartre, then proceeded up to the top of the church. As you can see, there are panoramic views of Paris. Alas, years of visitors have scratched or drawn their initials on the gallery pillars and walls, so the place is far from pristine.

Eiffel Tower from Sacre Coeur Dome © Harold Davis

Exposure data: 24mm, nine exposures at shutter speeds from 1/800 of a second to 2/5 of a second, each exposure at ISO 200 and f/25; tripod mounted; exposures combined using Nik HDR Efex Pro, processed in Photoshop, and converted to monochromatic using Photoshop and Nik Silver Efex Pro.

Also posted in France, Paris | Leave a comment

Chateau de Nazelles

By Harold Davis | Published May 16, 2013

The Chateau de Nazelles is located a few miles from Amboise in the Loire Valley. Built by some of the same craftsmen that constructed Chenonceau Chateau, today it is a wonderful bed and breakfast that I used as a base of operations. This image, in monochromatic HDR, conveys the feeling that being there is like visiting old France—and is more like a line drawing, or lithograph, than a photo. However, color images to come will also show the incredible lushness of the Loire in spring.

Chateau de Nazelles © Harold Davis

Exposure info: Nine exposures, each exposure at f/22 and ISO 100, with shutter speeds ranging from one second to 1/200 of a second; tripod mounted; exposures combined using Nik HDR Efex Pro and processed in Photoshop, with monochromatic conversion using Nik Silver Efex Pro and Photoshop black & white adjustment layers.

Also posted in France, HDR | Leave a comment

Eiffel

By Harold Davis | Published May 15, 2013

Reviled when it was built as a fun house rocket ship and aesthetic monstrosity, it’s amazing how the Tour Eiffel in fact manifests visual grace with decorative flourishes and curls in the ironwork. Seen from a distance with the lights of Paris turned on, the spectacle is a bit amusement park—but up close there’s an almost decorative art nouveau feeling, despite an anachronistic and blatant attempt at modernism.

Eiffel © Harold Davis

To make this image, I turned my camera up towards the tour. To exaggerate the open and lacy feeling of the structure, I overexposed by about 2 EVs. This made sure that the darker areas of the tower didn’t go entirely black, and allowed the filigree patterns in the less dense areas to emerge.

The final settings at 22mm focal length and ISO 200 were a 1/80 of a second shutter speed and f/4.5.

Also posted in Paris, Photography | Leave a comment

Beside the Seine

By Harold Davis | Published April 22, 2013

Amazing that one can leave San Francisco and in one day be photographing in Paris! This is a view of the Seine River from the Ile St Louis in the center of Paris.

Quai de Bourbon © Harold Davis

Also posted in Paris, Photography | 2 Comments

The Unphotographed Photos

By Harold Davis | Published April 18, 2013

What happens when a photo is a file that languishes in a folder? It may be a little like the tree falling in the forest without recognition. Here are some of my “unseen” photos, published for the first time on my blog.

Granite Sea © Harold Davis

I shot this image of rolling, and roiling waves, from the pier in Pacifica, California the other day. Roaring towards me in a steady wind-blown progression, these waves look almost like a rock face—hence the title, Granite Sea.

Bolinas Beach © Harold Davis

A bright winter day found the clouds reflected at low tide on Bolinas Beach, California—captured with my lens aided by a polarizing filter to bring out the strength of the reflections and contrast in clouds and sky.

Ruined Stair © Harold Davis

Near sunset, I found this ruined stair under a crumbling pier in the old harbor of Port Richmond, California—looking for all the world like something out of an etching or drawing by M.C. Escher or Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Also posted in Photography | Leave a comment

Windswept Sea

By Harold Davis | Published April 14, 2013

Last week I spent some time wandering on Point Reyes with my oldest son Julian (he was off from school for the week). The land and sea were swept by a strong wind, which made photography difficult, but we had a great time being out in the weather.

Windswept Sea © Harold Davis

Looking at these wind-tossed waves reminded me that soon I will be across a different ocean, and far from home. Next week I am leaving for France, where I am leading a workshop in Paris. I’ll try to keep images and stories coming to this blog.

To make this image I stacked two fast shutter speed captures (each was shot hand held at 1/640 of a second at f/13 and ISO 200). In the strong wind a tripod was hopeless, and I couldn’t hope to stack more than two hand held exposures. I next increased the contrast and tonal range by multi-processing the RAW files to add additional layers of light and dark.

I like the way the Windswept Sea image has become an abstraction, an alternating pattern of lights and darks, that only comes into resolution as the ocean when I shift my eyes away from the image, and then back again.

Please check out my Monochromatic Visions Kickstarter project, and if you are able to do so, I would greatly appreciate your support of my photographic goals.

Also posted in Landscape | Leave a comment

New $10,000 Stretch Goal for Monochromatic Visions

By Harold Davis | Published April 13, 2013

I’m very excited that our Monochromatic Visions Kickstarter was funded in less than 24 hours! Thanks so very for your support.

Because of all the excitement around the Monochromatic Visions portfolio, I’ve added a dream “stretch goal”—with an ambitious $10,000 goal. This goal will fund sending me on a photographic pilgrimage to create a unique portfolio of old Japan with the intention of creating a monochromatic portfolio based on my journey.

Road Less Traveled © Harold Davis

Here’s how we put it on Kickstarter:

If the Monochromatic Visions Kickstarter raises $10,000, Harold, his creativity, his camera, and his tripod will take a pilgrimage to the temples of Kyoto, Japan, and on foot to the world heritage Kumano kodo (old road of Japan).

The Kumano kodo is a network of trails leading south from Kyoto into the remote and mystical Kii Peninsula. This has been a route of pilgrimage for over 1,000 years, and includes a number of arduous trails, among them Nakahechi-do, Kohechi-do and Ohechi-do (these trails are known collectively as the Kumano kodo). Harold’s destinations will include the Grand Shrine of Hongu, and the Nachi Grand Shrine at the Pacific Ocean.

On his return from this photographic pilgrimage, Harold will create a portfolio of unique monochromatic images based on work photographed during his journey. This portfolio will be lovingly printed on traditional Japanese Kozo washi produced by a Japanese paper mill that has been in the same family for 700 years.

Harold says, “Thank you for supporting my work. I am so excited by the early funding of Monochromatic Visions. This stretch goal is a photographic journey that I’ve wanted to fulfill for many years. The opportunity of photographing rural Japan and some of Japan’s most sacred shrines would deepen my photographic life-journey and help me to reach further into my spiritual creativity. Thank you for supporting a living artist and for helping me to realize my artistic dreams!”

We’ve added some exciting new rewards related to the stretch goal (including the unique opportunity to walk with Harold in Japan while he creates the new Kumano Kodo portfolio), please check them out. And thanks ever so much for your support.

The infinitesimal and the infinite

By Harold Davis | Published April 4, 2013

I think perhaps that The Incredible Shrinking Man, a 1957 film about a man who shrinks to nothing following an encounter with a radioactive cloud, had an indelible impact on a portion of my visual aesthetic. I know that The Incredible Shrinking Man was one of the first movies I ever saw (what were my parents thinking?). No doubt due to my tender years, I took the pseudo-profundities uttered by Grant Williams, the actor who plays the shrinking man as, well, profundities.

Death Valley Badlands © Harold Davis

It’s hard to resist lines like this one: “So close — the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

To this day, I enjoy playing with scale in my imagery. It’s one of my goals to create iconography that compels at least a second glance, and using indeterminate scale is one way to get there.

Sand Dollar © Harold Davis

For example, the Sand Dollar shown above is captured at near microscopic level. But the vista of badlands in Death Valley (far above) could easily be an enlargement of the pattern in the shell. You see, it’s all a circle, with the large and vast ultimately smaller than the small and tiny—or vice versa.

For the record, the other movie I remember well from my early years was Some Like It Hot. My brother and I were supposed to be asleep in the back of the family station wagon at the drive-in movie theater. Now what artistic influence did Some Like It Hot have?

Also posted in Bemusements | Leave a comment

Living at the border of immensity

By Harold Davis | Published April 2, 2013

I looked out over the vast Arizona plateau leading to the great canyon made by the Colorado Rover. The late autumn sun was setting quickly, creating shadows in the undulating up-country. If you look at the image sized larger it is easy to see tracks that extend across this apparently trackless waste. What would it be like to live here at the border of immensity?

Arizona Plateau at Sunset by Harold Davis

Arizona Plateau at Sunset © Harold Davis

Exposure data: 120mm, three exposures at shutter speeds between 1/80 of a second and 1/320 of a second, each exposure at f/8 and ISO 200, tripod mounted; exposures combined and converted to monochromatic in Photoshop.

Also posted in Landscape | Leave a comment

Smoking Gun

By Harold Davis | Published March 29, 2013

There’s one somewhat discordant element in this tableau of a metallurgic assayer’s desk, shot at Laws Railroad Museum near Bishop, California. What is the gun doing in the image?

According to the docent I spoke with, most assayers tended to deal in gold and other precious metals as well as to assay it. The natural tendency for miners hitting what passed for civilization out of their stakes in Death Valley or the Panamint Range was to want to get some ready money quickly—no doubt for some to spend on booze and women in wild boom towns like Bodie. These miners would often come to feel that they had been low-balled by assayers who had taken advantage of them; hence, a revolver to defend against disgruntled small mining stake-holders was standard equipment for most metallurgists.

Exposure data: 52mm, ten exposures at shutter speeds between 1/80 of a second and five seconds, each exposure at f/13 and ISO 200, tripod mounted; exposures combined using Nik HDR Efex Pro and Photoshop, and converted to monochromatic using Photoshop, Nik Silver Efex and Topaz Adjust.

Also posted in Bemusements, HDR, Photography | Leave a comment

Gnarled wood in the desert

By Harold Davis | Published March 19, 2013

In the desert life is harsh, and the intensity of light reflects the harshness of conditions. Photography is best at the fringes of the day—the “golden hour” leading up to sunset, the half hour just after sunset, and the half hour of comparatively serene light one finds at dawn.

Gnarled wood in the desert by Harold Davis

I created this monochromatic HDR image shortly after sunrise in Glorieta Canyon, part of the Anza-Borrego Desert in southeastern California. To make the image I used my 200mm macro lens, and mounted my camera on a tripod. There were five exposures, shot at ISO 100 and f/16. Shutter speeds varied between 1/13 of a second (darkest) and 1.3 seconds (brightest).

The images were processed from the RAW using Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) and Nik HDR Efex Pro, then combined in Photoshop using layering. I used Photoshop, Nik Color Efex, Topaz Adjust, Topaz Simply, and PixelBender to enhance the image. Finally, I converted the image to monochromatic using Photoshop, Nik Silver Efex, and a “reserved” layer from the original HDR Efex monochromatic HDR processing.

Also posted in HDR, Landscape | Leave a comment

Cayucos Pier

By Harold Davis | Published March 7, 2013

On a wet, sloppy evening with the tide coming in it was fun to photograph the old wooden pier in Cayucos, California. The sky darkened and the storm moved landward—it was a proverbial photofinish between how long the light would hold out and how long my exposures had to be. The one shown below was in fact exposed for 3 minutes. Shortly after it completed the rain began in earnest.

Steel Wool

By Harold Davis | Published February 26, 2013

Sometimes you don’t have to go far to find something exotic to shoot, like this close-up portrait of industrial-grade steel wool, purchased at Costco.

Exposure data: 85mm tilt-shift macro, 1.3 seconds at an effective aperture of f/64, ISO 100, tripod mounted; processed in Adobe Camera RAW, Photoshop, and Silver Efex.

The Bristlecone Pines Endure

By Harold Davis | Published February 19, 2013

Above 10,000 feet in the arid White Mountains in eastern California the ancient Bristlecone Pines thrive. In this extreme environment wood decomposes slowly, and these trees can look more dead than alive. In this state a tree can live on for centuries, the spark of life embedded within the enduring structure of wood.

Coming upon a composition of apparently dead wood formed by a living Bristlecone Pine, I could see that I wanted a black and white image that showed the spectacular patterns of wood grain—and also that the ability to make this image was beyond the tonal range of any single capture. So I resolved my dilemma by making multiple captures, and taking the image from mundane to striking in its tonal variety.

Exposure and processing data: 200mm macro lens, six exposures at shutter speeds ranging from 1/500 of a second to 7/10 of a second, each exposure at f/32 and ISO 200, tripod mounted; RAW files processed in Adobe Camera RAW and Nik HDR Efex Pro with post-production in Photoshop, monochromatic conversion using Photoshop and Nik Silver Efex Pro.

Also posted in HDR, Photography | Leave a comment

Bay Bridge Lights

By Harold Davis | Published January 30, 2013

In this image of the Bay Bridge the moon seems to be “captured” within the tower of the Bay Bridge. The image is a hand-HDR blend of six exposures at shutter speeds from 1/2 of a second to 8 seconds. During one of the exposures the lights for The Bay Lights, an art installation and project by Leo Villareal that will come on “for real” on March 5, 2013 appeared briefly (in testing mode I guess), and I painted them in on a layer at about 30% opacity. Note that this light show has nothing to do with the 75th anniversary of the Bay Bridge, which has come and gone—and is simply a rather wonderful art installation.

Moon Captured by the Bay Bridge - Black & White by Harold Davis

The sequence of exposures in this image was shot during Saturday’s smashing moonrise adventure workshop—which I feel was good photographically and a very successful workshop despite the break-in of my van. I started with color images, combined them, manipulated them in post-production to create an image with an extended range of tonal values—withthe results shown below. To finish the image, I then converted it to black and white, using layers and masking to control how each section of the image converted.