Yesterday I made a photographic trip to the Big Sur coast. It was a spectacular day for photography, and some images will no doubt follow in the due fullness of time! I was pleased to be able to stop in Carmel-by-the-Sea to view the Night Vision: Photographing in the Dark exhibition at the Weston Gallery.

Me at the Weston Gallery

Yes, that’s me in the iPhone snapshot between a print of one of my favorite Ernst Haas images, Route 66, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1969, and my own Starry Night.

Since you can’t really see my Starry Night image from the iPhone shot I’ve reproduced it below. It’s a real honor (thanks Weston Gallery!) to be included along with Haas and many of my photographic idols such as Bernice Abbott, Wynn Bullock, Robert Frank, Michael Kenna, André Kertész, and Jerry Uelsmann. A spectacular print of the famous night seascape with a lightening strike by Bob Kolbrener is also included in the exhibit.

One interesting point is that most of the photographs in Night Vision are in the old school tradition: silver-halide prints made on photo sensitive paper using an enlarger, mostly photographed with medium or large format film. I think the Haas image and mine are the only color prints in the exhibit, and I think mine is the only digital (rather than film) photo.

Night Vision will be on display until January 8, 2017.  If you are in the Carmel area, or get the chance to visit, I strongly urge you to stop by the Weston Gallery and check out this beautiful exhibition. While Night Vision should be particularly be of compelling interest if you want to become a better night photographer, anyone who is simply interested in fine photography shouldn’t miss the chance to check it out.

Starry Night © Harold Davis

In the practice of modern photography, an exposure as long as five minutes duration during daytime hours seems like eternity. This is particularly true in the context of the raging Pacific Ocean along the outer beaches of Point Reyes, which is always churning and in frantic motion.

To achieve this effect near sunset on South Beach, with my camera on a tripod, I added a +4 neutral density filter, a polarizer, and lowered the ISO while stopping the lens down (I’ve noted the full exposure data below; these exposures shifted as the scene got darker).

From a visual viewpoint, the long exposure time reduces the seascape of beach, waves, and sky to elemental horizontal lines—perhaps almost a landscape in the sense that a Rothko color field painting is a landscape. Looking at this in another way, the long exposure time performs a kind of mathematical role, and reduces the random chaos of the storm-tossed inter-tidal zone to the basic overall patterns, teasing out consistency where nature produces apparent chaos.

Long Exposure Wave Study 2, South Beach © Harold Davis

Exposure data: Both images Nikon D810, +4 ND filter, circular polarizer; Upper image: 44mm, 299 seconds at f/29 and ISO 31; Bottom image: 65mm, 299 seconds at f/16 and ISO 64.

Long Exposure Wave Study, South Beach © Harold Davis

Related story: Face of the Deep.

This is the box of pastels that Katie Rose loves to use to make her art. You can see she uses the pastels hard, but treats them with great care, rearranging the ones that are in pieces tenderly in the box. Like beloved toys, art supplies live to be used hard!

Pastels © Harold Davis