Photoblog 2.0

Red Cyclamen, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Where the composition of a photo is about pattern, a single color often plays an important role. Cases in point: the photo of the cyclamen above is almost entirely red, with green accents, while the capture of water drops on a lupine (below) is essentially monochromatically green.

Related links: A Sense of Scale; Patterns category on Photoblog 2.0.

[Both photos: Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), and 36mm extension tube. Above: 3 seconds at f/36 and ISO 100. Below: 1/3 of a second at f/40 and ISO 100.]

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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.]

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.]

Past the Golden Gate Bridge, Black Sands Beach lies along the straits between Point Diablo and Point Bonita. The beach faces the open Pacific towards the southwest. On a sullen, cloudy, windswept day I hiked down to the beach. My camera and tripod were on my back. It was bright, but drizzling slightly.

The dark beach was empty of people, and it was hard to believe that a great metropolitan area was hard by. A great flock of seagulls huddled togather at the western end of the beach.

Hard by where the trail ended on the beach there were great piles of bird feathers, caught and held by the wind. These were no fancy feathers. I placed my tripod legs in the mud, and began to photograph with my macro lens stopped all the way down.

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Initially, I was most attracted to the contrast in textures between the feathers and the green grass (above). As I spent more time looking at the feathers, I became interested in the filagree and transparency of the feathers up close (below).

As I took these photos, the waves crashed on the dark beach and the spray mingled with the moisture in the wind. I hovered, protecting my camera as best I could, and wiping it dry from time-to-time with my shirt.

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[105mm f/2.8 macro, 157.5mm equivalent focal length if 35mm, 1/6 of a second (top exposure), 1/5 of a second (bottom), both at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related story: Feathers.

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.

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

It was overcast and damp today. Rachel was taking care of the kids, and Phyllis and I had some precious time alone. We decided to do stuff, go for a hike in the wind and weather, rather than sticking ourselves inside a movie.

We hiked down to Black Sands Beach on the north, and outer, side of the Golden Gate channel. It was wet and blowing. At the bottom of the stairs onto the beach, a natural wind trap had formed. These seagull feathers were gathered in the trap. I photographed them low to the ground in bright, overcast, and moist conditions.

My first thought was to use a fast enough shutter speed to stop the motion of the feathers in the wind. But some of the feathers were wet and pinned down: these feathers were not moving. In the end, I went for greater depth-of-field, and figured that a slight blur on the feathers that were in motion added to the ethereal ambience.

We were the only people on the beach for a while, and after I finished photographing the feather we walked it end-to-end. Then we headed back to the car, drove into San Francisco, and saw the Martin Munkacsi exhibition at SFMOMA.

[105mm f/2.8 macro, 157.5mm equivalent focal length if 35mm, 1/5 of a second at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related stories: Blue Feather, Rose Moon Rising (the time before this we had a sitter).

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

This is another image from my shoot last week on Point Reyes with Mike Trimble. I pointed my camera straight down at the ocean from the edge of a bluff overlooking Drakes Bay.

The waves were coming rolling in regularly, but the fierce wind was causing some of them to roll back out again, so that in this photo an incoming and outgoing wave are just about touching. Wave tangents, you might say.

Waves, Drakes Bay, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a photograph of waves looking almost straight down from a high bluff overlooking Drakes Beach. The surf was moderate in the shelter of Drakes Bay. There was a strong wind, perhaps 20-30 miles per hour, blowing out to sea. You can see the wind as a blurring effect in the upper part of the photo and as small, dark waves rippling back out towards the ocean in the lower left.

I was struck by the pattern made by the waves, almost like a big upper case N. My camera was tripod mounted, and I was shooting at 200mm (300mm in 35mm equivalence terms). I realized that to capture the pattern of the waves I would need as fast a shutter speed as possible (despite my recent glee in long exposures). So I set my camera to shutter-preferred mode at 1/500 of a second, with an f-stop at ISO 100 of f/5.6 for this exposure.

I was on the bluff above the Pacific with Mike Trimble, also known as Pastor Mike. As Mike notes in his blog, we have a great deal in common including deep love for our wives, three kids (his are girls and mine are boys), a love for nature, and a passion for photography. As Mike also observed, our attitudes towards religion are pretty different.

Mike and I had met at the Point Reyes lighthouse parking lot. We went down the 300 plus steps to the lighthouse itself, and chatted with park Ranger Craig Morgan. It was too windy out on the point for any serious photography.

Next, we explored the area near the Chimney Rock trail, and then (hoping for a bit of shelter from the wind) heading for the Drakes Beach area. Later on we’d photograph South Beach and the raging ocean by the dying light, and then head to Inverness and the wreck of the tugboat Point Reyes for a picnic under the stars.

Altogether, this was a grand late afternoon and evening despite the wind. Mike is a very nice guy, and seriously interested in photography. He was pretty tactful in bringing up religion. Our most strenuous disagreement went something like this:

Mike: When my daughters got to evolution, I told them it did seem pretty far fetched.
Harold: Well, I see what you mean, but then again it would be pretty hard to take some of the statements in the bible literally.

So far, not so bad. And I think Mike scored some serious points when he said that it was hard to stand out here in a sublimely beautiful spot in nature and not believe in an intelligent pattern of design that must have been planned by a powerful diety.

It’s true for me that I can’t be in the grandeur of nature without feelings of awe, spirituality, and gratitude. However, if you credit God for this pattern of design, then you’d better credit Her for the design aspects of life that don’t make much sense as well. You know, war, poverty, sickness, global warming and so on. This particular point, that it is intellectually inconsistent to credit a diety for the wonderful things in our lives without also blaming the same diety for the things that aren’t so good, was brought home to me as a young teenager when I read Mark Twain’s fantastic, lucid, and angry The Mysterious Stranger.

Still, I was amused to read in Mike’s blog, The Journey: A Pastor’s Thoughts, that he partly regarded our day together as missionary work on his part. What am I, a heathen dancing around a pot in a native costume that I need a missionary? A funny picture, until you think that in a way I was a missionary in relation to Mike.

In fact, for me spending time with Mike, who in person is a decent thoughtful guy, is all about tolerance. I can tolerate Mike and his religious beliefs, and I hope he can tolerate me and mine, whatever they are. To express this differently, I believe that whenever there is true tolerance in the face of different structures of belief, then God is truly present.

Related stories: Waves on the Shore.

Snow on Pine, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In the early morning of Yosemite winter as Julian and I explored the valley, snow crystals hung on the branches of the trees, bending the branches towards the earth.

Patterns on a Wall, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The start for this image (above) is a photo of a peeling stucco wall (below). I photographed the portion of a wall in the late afternoon of a recent Sunday on a walk around my neighborhood in a brief respite from being Mr. Mom. The combination of the peeling stucco and the shadows on it reminded me of Japanese Kanji characters.

Taking the original photo, I fooled around in Photoshop with layers, channels, and masking to come up with the abstraction above.

Here’s the original photo:

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

The patterns in this image of the forest in snow don’t make for a grand statement. The pleasures, particularly when viewed in a larger size, are more subtle.

Waves 1, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

As Julian and I clambered around Bodega Head, I look down at the vast, windswept, mis-named Pacific Ocean below. I attempted to capture the light on the moving waves as an abstraction. If you know they are waves, you can see they are waves, but otherwise these images might as well be Jackson Pollacks, particularly the one below.

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Turkey Feather, photo by Harold Davis. View this photogram larger.

This turkey feather looks to me almost like a strange textile construction!

Currents of Light, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

I sat by the banks of the Tulomne River in the wilderness of Yosemite’s backcountry. Julian played on the beach, building castles and roadways. Sunlight reflected on the river, blown hither and thither by the wind. Currents of light, patterns of happiness.

Getting the Drop, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that I’ve been photographing water drops. And that for me, each water drop is a world, as Blake put it, in a grain of sand. (Here’s a fairly complete selection of my water drop photos on Flickr.)

The two photos in this story are among my favorites of my recent water drop worlds. Everything seems to come together in the photograph of a single drop above: sharp focus on the drop, a nice sunburst, and a nice inner world showing the white Scabiosa atropurnea (”Snow Maiden”) that hosts the water drops and shows drops within the drop.

The photograph below shows a cosmos full of water drops, each caught by the thin filament of a spider’s web, and on and on into an apparent infinity.

Both photographs were captured with the same gear, and roughly the same setup. That is, my wonderful Nikon D200, my stupendous Nikkor 200mm f/4 macro lens, a 36mm extension tube and a +4 diopter close-up filter, mirror lockup, and a remote trigger. The single drop (above) was exposed at f/36 for 0.2 of a second, and the multiple drops (below) at f/40 and 0.8 of a second (both ISO 100).

To digress for a second, the 200mm f/4 Nikkor macro is as heavy as big telephoto lens (which it kind of is at 300mm 35mm equivalence). One of the things about it that really makes my life easier is the built-in tripod collar. The tripod collar lets me shift the center of gravity forward on the tripod (by mounted the lens rather than the camera). It also lets me change the orientation of the photograph by loosening the screw that holds the collar in place and rotating the lens. Meaning that I don’t have to move the camera at all. A big, expensive, special purpose lens. But well worth the price if you do much macro work.

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