Photoblog 2.0

Gaillardia x grandiflora, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This flower is a Gaillardia x grandiflora ‘Oranges and Lemons’. Gaillardias are native to North America, and are sometimes called Blanket Flowers because of their coloration.

I’m using an eight foot long raised bed in my protected side yard to grow flowers for photography, and this Gaillardia is the first subject. As models go, I think my flowers will prove to be very pretty and cooperative. Another benefit: they don’t seek modeling fees.

I photographed this flower on a black velvet background using diffuse natural sunlight. A previous experiment had convinced me that a single point of focus wouldn’t create an image that was sharp all over the flower. So I made twelve varying exposures at three focus points, and hand layered them together for an HDR and HFR image.

Some related stores: Falling in Love, Red Flowering Dogwood Blossom, Gaillardia, Digital Photograms.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 12 captures at shutter speeds from 1/2 of a second to 8 seconds, all at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Looking Down, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I took the original version of this photo (you can see it below) from the top of a rotunda in San Francisco City Hall. You can see a couple of people reading notices by a courtroom door, and the faint shadow of people in motion walking the corridors, rendered wraith-like by the long three-second exposure (selected so I could get plenty of depth of field).

The circular opening in the photo was actually pretty narrow, and the railing was high. The problem for me was getting my tripod in position over this balustrade. Even so, some tripod shadow and a tripod leg ended up in the capture, and I had to Photoshop them out.

With a decent rotunda view in hand, I pasted in four successively smaller (each copy was 20% of the size of the previous version) copies of the orginal image, to create a composite with the illusion of endless depth. This is the same technique I used in Endless Stairs and World without End.

As Phyllis says, “Down, down, into the pits of Hell, each a circle of bureaucracy lower in the pit!”

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[Nikon D300, 10.5mm digital fisheye, 3 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Door Knob Dome Scandal, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Everyone thought it a scandal when the door knob in my basement got together with the dome in San Francisco. But the dome and door knob were merely romantic, and invited a red rose, too.

Related image: Dream Stairs.

Nautilus in Black and White, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Finley Eversole contacted me for permission to use one of my chambered nautilus images in his book Art, Death and Transformation, to be published by Inner Traditions in 2009. Based on my conversation with Finley, he’s a man with personal experience of the abstract expressionists. I gather that his book is about the relationalship of the spiritual to art, particularly in the context of mid-twentieth century art. There’s an extensive discussion of Robert Smithson’s famous Spiral Jetty, constructed in 1970 and located in the Great Salt Lake, Utah.

In the context of Spiral Jetty, Finley wanted to illustrate spirals in nature, hence my chambered nautilus image. The catch was that he could only reproduce my image in black and white. Here’s the original image in color (you may notice that the black and white version is rotated).

I undertook the conversion to black and white myself because I was afraid that anything like a straight RGB to Grayscale switch would result in a murky image that lacked contrast. Converting RGB to Grayscale simply throws away the color information in the image, much as will happen when you discard the AB channels in LAB mode. Getting a little more sophisticated than this, I converted using a black and white adjustment layer. On the default settings, the results were predicably flat. Using the so-called Ansel Adams settings (explained here) and a channel mixer adjustment layer, I got slightly better results. By the way, my new book Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers from O’Reilly includes a case study that visually shows the impact of various black and white conversion techniques.

So I realized I needed to do a great deal of preparation, and essentially change the contrast structure of the image, before discarding the color information. I put the image through a variety of steps, but the most effective was the selective deployment in tritone mode (also explained in Light & Exposure and see Toned), using black, white, and Pantone metallic silver as the three colors.

By the way, I am planning to make prints of both the black & white and color versions of this image, so please let me know if you have an interest in owning a print.

I’ll leave the last words to Finley Eversole:

The spiral represents the unfolding of our hidden creative powers and symbolizes both self-realization and boundless expansion. Its secret is beautifully dramatized by the chambered nautilus whose in-dwelling life unfolds cyclically and periodically, mirroring in itself the expanding spirals and eternal patterns of the evolving cosmos.

Related stories: Nautilus 69, Spirals, Resistance to Spirals is Futile.

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

I lay down at the bottom of the spiral staircase shown in After the Wedding. With my tripod fitting clumsily in a tight corner of the stair, I used my digital fisheye to take a vertiginous photo up the stair well. In Photoshop, I layered in an extension to the hallway and replaced the skylight at the top of the stairs. Finally, I duplicated the image and flipped it horizontally. I pasted the original and the flipped version together to create a symmetrical, but twisted, abstraction.

[Original photo: Nikon D300, 10.5mm digital fisheye, 5 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Memory Palace, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This digital photo collage is an elaboration of Dream Palace, itself a manipulation of a photo of William Randolph Hearst’s over-the-top underground swimming pool.

A memory palace, also called a method of loci, was a mnemonic system used for complex memorization in the days before external memory devices were common.

If you couldn’t write something complicated down, how were you going to remember all the details? A memory palace mentally pairs rooms in the imaginary palace with segments of the material to remember. Often the best mental memory palaces are based on an actual physical place.

If you want to try to construct a memory palace to help remember something complicated, here are some instructions for going about it.

The image below is a digital collage, meaning a Photoshop composite created by blending layers. As these collages go, this is a fairly simple piece. All the elements in the collage come from a single dSLR capture using my Nikon D300 (see below). So I’m able in this story to show where each element in the final digital collage comes from, how I generated the elements from the one capture, and how I put them together.

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The original of all three elements of this collage is an ISO 6400 photo of the underground pool at Hearst Castle shown below (here’s more info about the photo):

The final image is a triptych of three versions of this original photo. The middle image is the original photo with a duplicate version flipped vertically and layered on top, like so:

The left image is an inversion of the LAB A channel of the original image, like this:

However, I didn’t like lights putting out an apparently blue light, so I painted the yellow lights from the original back over:

The right image is an inversion of the LAB B channel of the original image:

Once again, I painted over the lights (a black lamp isn’t any better than a blue lamp):

To combine the three “panels” of my triptych, I started a new image sized to be three times as wide as the original, and then I added each element as a separate layer.

With this kind of effort, one of the most difficult things is to know when to stop. I’ll be writing about knowing when to stop in another story.

Some related stories: When Is a Photo Not a Photo; Variations, Resistance to Spirals Is Futile; World without End.

I’ve been shooting in low light at ISO 6400, partly on the grounds that my Nikon D300 is remarkably low noise, and partly on the grounds that noise can be used as part of the aeshetic of an image. My photos of the jellyfish in the aquarium tanks at Monterey are examples of this kind of high ISO work. However, I do find I need to selectively post-process for noise with these images.

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I processed these jellyfish photos, all shot at extremely high ISOs, for noise using Noise Ninja as a plug-in to Photoshop CS3. (Noise Ninja can run as a standalone or inside the Photoshop environment.)

With one twist (I’ll get to my variation in a moment), I used Noise Ninja in its default mode. This means opening Noise Ninja, profiling the image by clicking a button, tweaking the filter settings for strength, and then applying the noise reduction.

My own deviation from the tried-and-true starts by working on a duplicate layer, rather than the original. This is a best practice for Photoshop in any case. Then I use a layer mask to hide the Noise Ninja noise-reduced layer, and selectively paint in portions of this layer. Typically, I’ll work with two noise-reduction layers at different strengths, because even a very noisy image isn’t necessarily noisy all over. I also want the freedom to apply Noise Ninja selectively, and at different strengths, to different parts of my photos. I’ll leave some areas untouched.

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It’s worth noting that I use a similar selectivity-via-layers-and-masking approach when it comes to sharpening. Furthermore, I only sharpen luminance (black and white) and not the chroma (color) channels of a photo. My main sharpening tool is the paradoxically named Unsharp Mask Photoshop filter. Leaving chroma channels unsharpened happens to have a beneficial effect on the aesthetics of noise, so this kind of selective sharpening is really a help when you start with a noisy image.

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

May you be in love and happy with your sweetie in a most commendably non-commercial way!

This image of Hearts on Fire in the Sky is a Photoshop composite collage from almost three years ago, one of my first attempts at the genre.

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).

I sometimes wonder how I end up with images that are elaborate photo composites, having more visually in common with paintings than photographs. This images are born of photographic parents but brought up differently. It is nature versus nurture. In this case, the influence of nurture is so obviously non-photographic that the resulting composites must stand or fall on their own merits. They cannot be judged strictly as photos.

A case in point: the shoot of the photos of the reflections in downtown Oakland that I describe in There Is a There There. (Also see Reflections, Downtown Oakland, Persistence of Reflections, and More Oakland Reflections.)

A number of these photos of the Oakland reflections became grist for my Photoshop mill. Here’s how it usually goes: I am post-processing a photo in a relatively straight way. I see something neat, and this starts a “what if” visual train for me. Later, I find a related image to combine with the original “what if.”

For example, Persistence of Reflections and More Oakland Reflections got worked over this way. I started with these photos shown in small size:

Looking at color inversions of the photos, I knew I had to try something weird with them. Many Photoshop hours, layers, and masks later, here are the results:

Finished photo composite images: Civilization, Tower of Babel, Tower of Babel Variations.

Related story: Myths, Metaphors and Digital Photography.

Tower of Babel - Blue Variation, image by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

These are variations–in blue tones above, and in pink below–based upon Tower of Babel.

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Tower of Babel, Photoshop collage by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a Photoshop collage based on Persistence of Reflections and More Oakland Reflections. I think it is best viewed at a larger size.

Like my first collage based on the Oakland reflections, Civilization, the collage is of the two images combined. I separated each into component color channels in LAB and RGB color spaces, selectively inverted and equalized the channels, and combined using layer masks and a variety of blending modes (primarily Multiply, Overlay, Soft Light, Color, and Luminosity).

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

This is a Photoshop collage based on my Oakland reflections photos.

Related stories: There Is a There There; Persistence of Reflections; Reflections, Downtown Oakland.

Heart of the Wave, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I couldn’t resist having some Photoshop fun with The Wave #5. This Photoshop composite flips the original image vertically and horizontally (using the photo four times) to create this trippy effect.