Katie Rose has found her thumb. Not always, not always easily, but when she does find her thumb it seems to bring her great peace and joy.

Katie is closing in on four pounds, she is getting to be a “big girl.” At 32 weeks gestationally (the age she would have been if Phyllis were still pregnant with her) her sucking reflex is coming in. Sweet!

The Golden Gate as you’ve never seen it before…Now available, 100 Views of the Golden Gate by Harold Davis from Wilderness Press.

With a bow to the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) whose woodblock series 100 Views of Mt. Fuji celebrates Japan’s iconic mountain, Bay Area native Harold Davis has created a collection of over 100 striking digital photographs of the Golden Gate—the strait that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean and the Bridge itself—as well as back stories for each photo.

Author of several photography books, Harold Davis is a frequent speaker on digital techniques at Bay Area venues, ranging from Book Passage to MacWorld.

100 Views of the Golden Gate by Harold Davis: $30 * 1st edition * hardcover * full-color * 176 pages * 9 1/2 X 10 * ISBN 978-0-89997-447-7

We were getting the boys haircuts. At the hair cutting place I saw this mirror and reflections of bottles and the street. So I did the grab shot thing.

I’m not maintaining this photo is a piece of great art per se. But I do believe that if you want to take interesting photos you need to look with fresh eyes at the everyday things around you.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 200mm (300mm in 35mm terms), 1/125 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 400, hand held with vibration reduction turned on.]

Forthwith, and in no particular order, life as it is now in the Davis family starring Julian, Nicky, and Mathew.

I think Julian is getting genuinely handsome, and in this photo he looks to me a little like the actor Robert Mitchum. He’s turning eleven this month.

Mathew’s big eyes would win anyone over. With this almost-four-year old, you never know whether he will be the biggest pill or the sweetest child in the universe (or both, at the same time).

Mathew is moving beyond Thomas, but he still loves his train layouts.

Nicky is a real piece of work. He’s quick and cute, and he knows it. The photographic challenge is to catch him when he isn’t in motion, or over the top with his gestures.

We took the boys for a haircut, and Nicky mugged in the mirror.

This was Mathew’s first “voluntary” haircut, and he did a great job. He took his turn ahead of his big brothers, and we were all proud of him. You can see Ruby, who did a heroic job of the actual shearing, in the mirror with the Davis family (including the Davis photographer).

Phyllis was kangaroo holding Katie Rose, and I thought their hands together made such a great contrast of sizes that I snapped away.

Katie has come such a long way, and grown so much, but comparing mother-and-daughter hands reminds me she is still pretty small. Yesterday she gained two ounces and she is gaining quickly on four pounds. We’re starting to hear talk around the NICU that is promising: maybe Katie will be ready to move out of her isolette and into a basinette soon. Maybe the hospital will schedule a medical meeting in a couple of weeks to start thinking about discharge plans…it all seems like a dream.

Speaking of dreams, here’s a digital photographer’s surreal and dissonant moment: Last night I couldn’t sleep. So I made a cup of chamomille tea and turned on the network and computers. At 4AM I was working on the photo of Katie and Phyllis holding hands. There were no major exposure issues.

But I did find that Phyllis’s hands needed some work, and I knew she would never forgive me if I posted the photo without giving her a digital manicure. So there I was, sipping tea, smoothing cuticles, fixing dry skin, and rounding nails. Katie’s hand doesn’t need this kind of treatment, yet.

Several years ago I planted a couple of exotic hydrangea plants in the shade in my front garden. (I know that “exotic hydrangea” sounds like an oxymoron, but believe me, these two are pretty wild.)

To make this image, I clipped off a crown of hydrangea from one of these plants, actually consisting of a calyx of the mature hydrangea flower with the large sepals (florets) shown here arranged around the cirumference of the construction.

I first put the hydrangea crown on my Epson 1660 flatbed scanner, and pulled some high resolution scans into Photoshop. In the scan that worked best I was “painting” with a moving LED light as the scanner did its thing. The scanner lid was open. I had to be careful to keep the light on the flowers. This took a few tries. When I got it right, the background mostly went black.

The Epson 1660 is a fairly inexpensive scanner, but it is amazing what high resolution one can get using it or comparable equipment. However, the result has no depth. If I could only get a lens with a diaphragm between that flatbed scan and the subject…I’d have, well, a camera. One with a really big sensor.

Next, I photographed the hydrangea from straight on top of a white light source, overexposing for transparency. (White Anemone is a good example of this technique.)

To create the composite image of the hydrangea, I combined the scan and the photo by positioning the photo on top of the scan. (I’ve used a similar technique before, a good example is Nautilus on Black.) Sizing the top image so it laid precisely on top of the scan was a bit time consumptive, and essentially an issue of trial and error.

I then used layer masking to reveal (and hide) portions of the top image. Next, I duplicated the scan, put it on top of the assembled image, and layer masked once again to appropriately reveal and hide.

After all, isn’t that what photography is all about: strategic revelation and hiding?

When Phyllis holds Katie Rose, first Katie explores. She touches Phyllis with her hands, squeals, and makes little grunts. Her eyes open. She tries to look around. But it’s hard work for her to keep those eyes open, and pretty soon Katie is fast asleep. Phyllis drifts off pretty quickly too, a smile of contentment on her face.

In this photo, the nurse held Katie for me in the process of putting her back in the isolette. As you can see, Katie keeps on growing. She’s over 3 pounds 9 ounces. She’s got some pudge and is a far cry from the tiny little thing of only a few weeks ago.

Some of this growth can be attributed to the merits of Phyllis’s milk, which they feed to Katie using gavage (a feeding tube) and a pump. Probiotic bacteria are added to the milk to aid digestion. Katie also gets shots of Epogen, a biotech blockbuster drug from Amgen primarily used for anemic patients. In Katie, the drug is used to help the growth of red blood cells.

Phyllis pumps alot of milk for Katie. She pumps milk every two hours or so. She is running a surplus. She recently gave literally gallons of milk to the San Jose Mothers Milk Bank, where it will help feed other preemies who are not as lucky as Katie with their mother’s milk supply.

Nicky and I were fooling around taking his picture. I gave him the flower-on-black treatment: I covered a high-backed chair with black cloth, and put him on the chair. Then I radically underexposed to enhance the depth of black in the background. I was careful to focus precisely on Nicky’s right eye.

In post-processing, I pulled Nicky out of the darkness layer by layer. Next, I selectively softened the image using the Smoothness setting on the Filter palette of the Noise Ninja Photoshop plug-in: both to compensate for the noise in this high-ISO image and to create a pleasing softness in the face and hair.

Finally, I shifted the image to LAB color mode, and carefully used the luminance channel and layer masking to modestly sharpen Nicky’s eyes, and only Nicky’s eyes.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 95mm (142.5mm in 35mm terms), 1/250 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 2,500, hand held with vibration reduction turned on.]

This is the cover of the 7th edition of Prentice Hall’s Introduction to Clinical Psychology textbook. The image is my composite of a spiral stair and a chambered nautilus shell. You can read the back story of the composite Spirals image here.

Worth noting: this is a publisher with on-staff photo researchers. They found my image by browsing Flickr.

The sun was a fiery orange ball setting in a North California sky hazy from forest fires. I ran out with 400mm of telephoto (600mm in 35mm terms) and focused on plants in the foreground to take advantage of the dramatic solar appearance.

View this image larger.

[Both images: Nikon D300, 70-200mm VR zoom lens at 200mm, TC-20E 2X teleconverter, 1/320 of a second at f/7.1 and ISO 320, hand held with vibration reduction turned on.]