Monthly Archives: June 2018

Solar Flare

June 29, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Here’s the latest in my series of mandala images on a light box, this one with petals circling around a sunflower. The outer ring consists of “stars” from a flowering jade bush in my garden.

Here are some other “targets” or “mandalas”: Studies in Petals; Petal Fractals; Floral Mandala; Petals; and A Simple Twist of Fate.

Over time this has become a body of work, a ding an sich (“thing in-and-of-itself”). This seems to happen when I start working in a new direction. The direction becomes a genre—one that I revisit periodically.

It would be nice to see these, perhaps printed for display on their own light boxes, together in one exhibition.

Solar Flare on Paper © Harold Davis

Solar Flare on White © Harold Davis

Solar Flare on Black © Harold Davis

Posted in Photography

Tulip Petal Detail after Karl Blossfeldt

June 26, 2018 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

Who knew that tulip stems could curl symmetrically with four looping branches? When I saw this, it reminded me of some of the flora photographed by Karl Blossfeldt. Blossfeldt’s original purpose was to present plant-world designs that could be used for ornamental architecture and ironwork, but of course his work has long since been recognized as far more profound than decorative.

I used a macro lens to capture the tulip petal detail, and used a post-production recipe that I had scripted this spring to simulate (or emulate) the look-and-feel of a Blossfeldt plate.

Tulip Petal Detail after Blossfeldt © Harold Davis

Some other images of mine that offer homage to Karl Blossfeldt: Decorative Grasses; Queen Anne’s Lace and Crassula ovata (both shown below).

Queen Anne’s Lace © Harold Davis

Crassula ovata © Harold Davis

Posted in Flowers, Photography

2018 Photographing Flowers for Transparency Workshop

June 24, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

This was a great Photographing Flowers for Transparency workshop this weekend, with nice folks who are creative photographers coming from many places around the world. I hope they get safely home with creative ideas for extending their practice of floral photography

I’m looking forward to teaching this again in 2019, and to finishing my book on the subject.

I used the image of a Papaver Rhoeas (corn poppy) shown here live in the workshop to demonstrate high-key layer processing!

Single Poppy © Harold Davis

Posted in Workshops

Two from the iPhone files

June 21, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Dogwood Flowers in a Bowl and Poppies and Echinaceas were both photographed with my iPhone camera. These were arrangements that were “collateral damage” to having flowers around from my garden and also cut from a flowering dogwood tree (see Garden Flowers with Dogwood). After photographing high-key bracketed exposures with my D850 on a tripod, I couldn’t resist also making a few quick iPhone shots shown here. Sometimes work thrown off casually just for fun stands up on its own!

Dogwood Flowers in a Bowl © Harold Davis

Both images were tweaked in Snapseed on my iPhone, then processed using the Antique Oil Painting Filter in the Photo Lab Pro app.

Poppies and Echinaceas © Harold Davis

Posted in Flowers, iPhone, Photography

Garden Flowers with Dogwood

June 19, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

This pair of images consists of a light box composition on white, and its LAB L-channel inversion on black. My thoughts are turning to Photographing Flowers for Transparency, as I am teaching my techniques this coming weekend.

Incidentally, if you can’t make the workshop this weekend, we’ve listed the 2019 Photographing Flowers for Transparency workshop. It’s scheduled for the weekend of June 22-23, 2019 in Berkeley, California—and is now open for registration. Click here for more information and registration via Meetup.

Garden Flowers with Dogwood © Harold Davis

Garden Flowers with Dogwood (Inversion) © Harold Davis

Posted in Flowers, Photography

The Passion of the Rose

June 16, 2018 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

For me, photography is about passion, vision, and seeing the world closely. Oh, I could give you some technical information about how this image was made. For example, I could explain that I used a telephoto macro lens and an extension tube, that I focus stacked, and that the rose was lit obliquely by late afternoon sun through a window.

The Passion of the Rose © Harold Davis

But beyond a certain point, who but specialists and practitioners really cares about this kind of thing? Does anyone much care what brush a painter like Georgia O’Keeffe used? We care about the raw seeing, the passion and the romance, and the feeling that the image arouses within. As we should. This is the stuff that matters.

Related image: Kiss from a Rose, shown on my blog here and here.

Posted in Flowers, Photography

White Daemon Series

June 12, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

The idea of this series of photos, created in collaboration with the model A Nude Muse, was to create images that were simultaneously attractive, eerie, uncanny, and otherworldly. Ignoring the Picasso-like displacement of body parts, the figure portrayed was to have one foot in this world, and one foot in another world—or perhaps some realm that is the realm of unearthly beings. Who knows what she can see of the future, or whether she is good or evil, or what the future brings.

White Daemon III © Harold Davis

White Daemon II © Harold Davis

White Daemon 1 © Harold Davis

White Daemon IV © Harold Davis

The technique I employed was to use a series of 8-10 in-camera multiple exposures using strobe lighting for each exposure. The camera did the combination of the imagery. For several reasons, one of which is that one can see instant results in the camera, this works better for this kind of image than photographing individual exposures, and later combining them in Photoshop. We used a white lace nightgown and a white lace scarf to add the dominant “spirit walker” theme to the model; her impact and affect in these images varies from Madonna to Bride to Succubus to Cassandra to a visitation from Death.

Model credit: A Nude Muse. Related images: See my Multiple Exposures series. If you get the chance, please let me know what you think by adding a comment, or via email.

Posted in Models, Multiple Exposures, Photography

Poppies Dancing on Black

June 11, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

This image is an LAB inversion of the L-channel of Poppies Dancing, with blacks and white interchanged.

Poppies Dancing Inversion © Harold Davis

Posted in Flowers, Photograms, Photography

Visit Paris in the Spring with a small group of Photographers

June 10, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Visit Paris in the Spring with a small group of photographers. Early-bird discount applies. Click here for more information.

Posted in Photography, Workshops

Vegetarian Homage to Anthony Bourdain

June 9, 2018 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

This is a breakfast avocado burrito that Phyllis made for Nicky, who is a vegetarian. Hopefully, Anthony Bourdain, who very sadly died yesterday, was quoted in his Washington Post obituary as having said (tongue-in-cheek): “Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food” would make an exception for Nicky and Phyllis’s avocado burrito (which someone told me looks more like a crab anyhow).

Avocado Burrito © Harold Davis

Mordant wit being one of his fortes, Bourdain went on to say that even worse than the vegetarians, from a cook’s point of view, were the “Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans.”

Posted in Photography

Poppies Dancing

June 8, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

In the great light of the world flowers are creatures too, and love to sway and dance in the breeze. In extraordinary beauty there is humor and escape from the mundane of this world. With grief for Anthony Bourdain, a hero of mine: as someone who travels a great deal for creative work I can understand why it might have contributed to his feelings of dislocation and sadness. These flowers are for him.

Anthropomorphization of flower arrangements is now a thing: Flower Car; Friendly Sky Dragon; Flying Dragon Study; Yum; Poppy Snake; Wet Poppy Bud. Well, for the most part these collages are not actually anthropomorphic—although there is a face or two. If you know the right word, please add a comment or drop me an email. Thanks.

Posted in Flowers, Photography

Relaxation in Rural France

June 5, 2018 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

Down the path to the Lot River from the Mas de Garrigue are a few rural homes on the bluff. I could easily imagine sitting here, perhaps reading a good book slowly, snacking on Pâté de Campagne, and sipping some nice local wine.

Posted in France, Photography

Petals on Parade

June 4, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

This is one of the light box compositions I’ve made using the glorious spring weather in northern California since I’ve been home from Spain!

Posted in Flowers, Photography

A Lens, Spirals, and a Selfie

June 2, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

On the boat ride around Menorca with PhotoPills camp, sitting up high on the upper deck, I saw a rig with a 19mm tilt-shift Nikkor. Cool lens. From the right angle, I could see internal colors and spirals, so I snapped an iPhone photo. Little did I know that I lurked in the reflections, so it was also a selfie!

Posted in iPhone

The Art of Photographing Flowers for Transparency: A new book from Harold Davis

June 1, 2018 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

We’re excited to announce a new book: The Art of Photographing Flowers for Transparency by Harold Davis.

Of course, my new book will showcase many of my botanical images. In addition, there will be extensive material explaining my process for photographing flowers on a light box. There will be a section on post-production, including a detailed guide to using LAB color for inversions of white-to-black, and for creative color effects.

The is a serious book in terms of its pedagogy, as the techniques I use in my transparent floral work are useful in many aspects of digital photography.

There will also be technical notes for the images in the book explaining how I made each image.

It’s a great deal of fun writing and designing this book. I have been working on this project for many years, so it is very exciting to me to see it progressing (my new book will be available in 2019)!

The images paired below are of poppies and mallow from my garden, captured, processed and inverted using the techniques I explain in The Art of Photographing Flowers for Transparency. If you’d like to learn more about these techniques before my new book is available, please check out my FAQs: Photographing Flowers for Transparency and Using a High-Key Layer Stack.