Monthly Archives: January 2019

Free Presentation: Photographing Flowers for Transparency

January 31, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

I’ll be talking about my Photographing Flowers for Transparency work, showing images, and discussing the process at a free presentation at the North Berkeley Public Library Community Meeting Room on Thursday March 28, 2019 at 5:30 PM. Please join me for a fun and “floriffic” evening!

Illumination © Harold Davis

What: Harold Davis presents images, thoughts, and tips related to his Photographing Flowers for Transparency technique. Click here for the Photographing Flowers for Transparency FAQ.

The presentation is free, and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis.

Where: Berkeley Public Library—North Branch, 1170 The Alameda, Berkeley, CA 94707.

When: Thursday March 28, 2019 at 5:30 PM. We will start seating at 5:15 PM. The presentation is expected to last about 45 minutes, with ample time for Q&A following.

About Harold Davis: Harold Davis is the bestselling author of many books, the developer of a unique technique for photographing flowers for transparency, a Moab Master, and a Zeiss Ambassador. He is an internationally known photographer and a sought-after workshop leader. His website is www.digitalfieldguide.com.

Library statement: Wheelchair accessible. Please refrain from wearing scented products to public programs.

PLEASE NOTE: This event is not sponsored by the Berkeley Public Library. Groups and organizations
may use meeting rooms when they are not being used for activities sponsored by the Library. Permission to use the meeting rooms does not imply Library endorsement of the goals, policies or activities of any group or organization. For more information on meeting rooms at the Berkeley Public Library, visit www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org.

Poppies and Mallows on White © Harold Davis

Posted in Workshops

Paris in the Spring! There is still time…

January 30, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Photograph Paris in April with Harold Davis (co-host Mark Brokering), April 27-May 5, 2019; explore and photograph the City of Light; Destination Photography Workshop includes several excursions, including after-hours photography exclusive to artists at Monet’s gardens at Giverny. Click here for more information and here for the Reservation Form; what a great time of year to visit Paris with our cameras! I love photographing Paris, and am pleased to be able to offer this destination photography workshop to a select few and share my knowledge, tips, and secrets. There is still time to join us, but if you are interested please don’t wait much longer!

Garden and Flower Photography, Palm Beach Photographic Centre, Palm Beach, Florida, February 8-10, 2019; click for information and registration. Coming up very soon, and there is still space! This is my first workshop in Florida, and I am looking forward to exploring. Come join me for some great botanical photography!

Photographing Flowers for Transparency—Covers Harold’s light box and floral photography and post-production techniques; two-day workshop Saturday June 22 and Sunday June 23, 2019 located in beautiful downtown Berkeley, CA. Click here for more information and to register via Meetup. This acclaimed hands-on workshop takes participants through Harold Davis’s Photographing Flowers for Transparency process from beginning to end. There are still a few seats available, but don’t wait too long as this workshop each year has filled up with a waiting list.

Photographing the Great Gardens of Maine, August 11-17, 2019 at Maine Media Workshop. This year we’ll have a great range of public and unique private gardens to photograph. Registration is now available! Click here for more information and registration.

Northern Morocco Photography Adventure, October 19-30, 2019 (12 Days and 11 Nights), cost is $3,200 per person. Click here for the Prospectus and FAQ, here for the complete Itinerary, and here for the Reservation Form. This small, select group (maximum 12) is starting to fill, so prepare for the photographic adventure of a lifetime!

Posted in Workshops

Approaching Indigo

January 29, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Approaching Indigo © Harold Davis

The early use of “indigo” referred to indigo dye made from Indigofera tinctoria and related species, and not specifically to a color. In the 1660s, Isaac Newton bought a pair of prisms at a fair near Cambridge, England. Around this time, the East India Company had begun importing indigo dye, replacing native woad as the primary source of blue dye. By the way, the actual color produced using indigo dye is probably somewhat different from the color referred to as “indigo” by optical scientists.

In an important experiment in the history of optics, Newton shone a narrow beam of sunlight through one of his prisms to produce a rainbow-like band of colors on the wall. This optical band had a spectrum of colors, and Newton named seven as primary colors: “Red, yellow, Green, Blew, & a violet purple; together with Orang, Indico, & an indefinite varietie of intermediate gradations.”

Interestingly, Newton linked the seven prismatic colors to the seven notes of a western major scale, with orange and indigo as semitones. What happens if you play colors like a musical scale?

In modern usage, indigo is a deep and rich color close to the primary color Blue in the RGB color space, a color somewhere between blue and violet. Many people have difficulty distinguishing indigo from its neighbors. According to sci-fi writer and science pundit Isaac Asimov, “It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes it seems merely deep blue.”

Asimov was wrong, but the color indigo needs to be approached with care. If you confront indigo directly, you may not see it, but in fact indigo takes its rightful and royal place on the visual spectrum when seen somewhere between blue and violet,

To construct this image, I used vases filled with colored water. To generate the colors, I used food dyes representing the primary colors, and passed bright sunlight from a West-facing window beamed through the colored water in combination—thus echoing Isaac Newton’s original, famous experiment with prisms and sunlight.

Posted in Abstractions, Photography

Hitting the Flickr Explore Jackpot with Crepuscular Coast

January 24, 2019 by Harold Davis | 3 Comments

Crepuscular Coast (v2) © Harold Davis

My monochromatic image Crepuscular Coast (shown above) hit Flickr Explore yesterday. This is a reprocessed version of the original image, which I originally photographed, processed, and posted in October 2018 (link to the original story here).

I reprocessed the image at the behest of a client, who wanted me to take down the crepuscular rays a bit (those rays were really there!). I also removed a small texture effect—which you can mostly see in the sky of the original version—so the reprocessed version is a cleaner, simpler, and starker image, although the differences between the two versions are really pretty subtle.

Three months out the original version on Flickr has 173 views and 4 Faves (“Faves” are the Flickr version of “likes”). In contrast, the reprocessed version on Flickr after about 36 hours has 10, 558 views and 575 Faves, and counting upwards. Whatever one’s opinion of the merits of the two versions, most of this vast difference in audience appreciation can be attributed to the inclusion of the recent one in Flickr Explore.

The eyeballs today for photography are mostly on Instagram, and if you want your work to be seen you need to go where the eyeballs are, despite the formidable limitations that Instagram has for serious photographers (it is designed best for mobile photography). But even compared with Instagram, when it comes to instant recognition, it is hard to beat Flickr Explore. My own experience is that any image that “makes Explore” get 10K page views almost immediately, and is typically profitably licensed. I get an image “Explored” once every quarter or so; besides Crepuscular Coast, two of the most recent ones are Lonely Road / Poem of the Road and Twisted.

So some of the images included in Flickr Explore are pretty compelling (I like to think mine are!), and others not so much. How do images get “Explored”?

In April, 2018 SmugMug bought Flickr from Verizon, who had acquired it about a year earlier from Yahoo. SmugMug has made it clear that being “Explored” is reserved for paying customers a/k/a Professional members of Flickr, which seems quite fair, and a good policy.

Besides membership category, Flickr itself is pretty mum about the process of being “Explored”, but points to an algorithm for something they dub “interestingness”. As one FAQ for an Explore derivative group on Flickr puts it, “Selections for Explore are made by a math equation. This math equation (called an algorithm) calculates a score based on how many views, faves and comments an images gets over a period of time. The better the score the higher an image gets placed in the Explore list. Faves are heavily weighted in the equation and are far more important than comments. This score is often referred to as the “interestingness” factor of an image.”

Of course, blaming an opaque algorithm for a secret sauce is not unusual in “high tech land,” whether that secret sauce is Google’s PageRank algorithm or Flickr’s interestingness algorithm for Explore. Really, the process of “being Explored” is pretty much a black box.

The only thing that is clear is that something like the community trail conundrum is at work: the more times a trail is trod upon the more visible it becomes, leading to more visits, more visibility, and a bigger trail, all in a virtuous spiral. Early movement is vital: you don’t get an image “Explored” unless it starts garnering views, comments, and faves pretty early in its online history. Anecdotally, based on my observations, I agree that faving (“liking”) is actually more important than views or comments in terms of the algorithm’s ranking.

So we don’t really know how images get into Explore. We do know that some of the images in Explore are very good and others are banal, or worse. Comments and observations are welcome. Perhaps if we put our communal heads together we can shed some light on this conundrum. After all, this is one more mysterious process in virtual space with real world consequences.

Posted in Flickr, Landscape, Monochrome, Photography

Review: A New Lens for Harold (the Irix 150mm “Dragonfly” macro)

January 22, 2019 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

Piercing the Iris Veil © Harold Davis

I photographed these close-ups of flower petals (image above: an Iris; image below: the petals of a Gerbera from behind) with a new lens, the Irix 150mm f/2.8 “Dragonfly” telephoto 1:1 macro. For a telephoto macro, this is a relatively inexpensive lens (about $600 recently at B&H). Apparently, the Irix lenses are designed in Switzerland, and manufactured in Korea.

The lens comes in a nice box, with a useful hard pouch for storage, amenities such as two rear lens caps and a nice lens hood, has a functional tripod collar with an Arca-mount foot that lets you switch from horizontal to vertical and back again, and is handsomely finished. It appears solidly made, with good materials in the right places.

That said, I did have a build quality issue with the first one I ordered from B&H, so I had to send it back for an exchange. I won’t go into details about what the problem was, except to note that it was a show-stopper (if you need to know, drop me an email). The build-quality issue suggests that if you buy one, make sure you buy from a reputable source, test it thoroughly during the return period, and send it back if necessary.

A complaint about the lens design is that it lacks a manual aperture ring, at least in the Nikon F mount (I haven’t tried the Canon or Sony E mount versions, so I can’t verify that this holds cross-platform, but it probably does). The expectation is that you are going to set the aperture using the camera.

This is a serious drawback in a lens that is likely to be used in technical circumstances, as is the case with a telephoto macro. In particular, if you use the lens with a bellows or an extension tube that has a manual diaphragm coupling (not an uncommon scenario with a lens of this sort), the only way to change the aperture that I could figure out is to dismount the whole lens-and-bellows, put the lens (or another lens) on, then reset the aperture, which will stick even after the lens is remounted on the bellows.

Somewhat counteracting this complaint, a nice bonus feature is a solid focus lock. This is useful when the lens is on a tripod and pointed downward, and you want to make a long exposure without having the focus slip.

This is a sophisticated, solidly built lens. According to the manufacturer, the aperture mechanism includes 11 rounded blades, designed to create pleasing bokeh (background blurring). The manual focus mechanism is solid and lends itself to precision. The lens has been weather sealed at key points.

Again according to the manufacturer, “The optical design consists of twelve elements – three of which are made of super-low dispersion glass (ED), another four of glass with a higher refractive index (HR), and the whole arranged into nine optical groups. Thanks to this construction, we obtain an close to zero distortion (at a level of 0.1%).”

Folks who know me well know that I collect macro lenses; in fact, I have been called “the Imelda Marcos” of macro lenses. I think I’ve lost track of how many I own, and I’m pleased to add this Dragonfly to my collection. It fills a gap between my Nikkor 200mm f/4 macro and the Nikkor 105mm and Zeiss 100mm macros. Subjectively, I think it beats the Nikkor 200mm (which only focuses to 1:2 rather than the 1:1 of the Dragonfly) in terms of sharpness, although it may not be quite up to the Nikkor 105mm or Zeiss 100mm. Even here, the modern design and coatings help with the comparison, and I like the extra reach of the 150mm focal length.

Probably the closest comparable lenses are the Canon 180mm macro (which won’t help Nikon users), and the Sigma 180mm telephoto macro, which by reputation is a great lens (I don’t own one), but considerably more expensive than the Irix.

So enough technical talk and comparison of other macro lenses. What I really think is below the image.

Gerbera Petals © Harold Davis

What Harold really thinks: First, both the images that accompany this story were made with the Irix 150mm f/2.8 “Dragonfly” stopped down to f/32. Obviously, these results are pleasing, with limited diffraction considering the small aperture, and I am happy to own this lens. I expect this to be a go-to telephoto macro lens in situations in which this specialized optic is called for.

Disclosures: None. I have no relationship whatsoever with Irix, and bought the lens with my own hard-earned cash money.

Posted in Equipment, Flowers, Photography, Reviews

Creative LAB Color Collage

January 19, 2019 by Harold Davis | 2 Comments

Harold Davis LAB collage © Harold Davis

This is a collage of LAB channel color adjustments, developed for my Creative LAB Color in Photoshop course for Lynda.com in LinkedIn Learning. To really get the idea, click here to view full screen.

Posted in Photography

Giant Ficus Tree

January 16, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Giant Ficus Tree © Harold Davis

This giant Ficus tree, Ficus macrophyllia, dominates one corner of Ventura’s Plaza Park. It was planted in 1874, and you can see how big it is by comparing the size of the car parked on the street to the left of the tree, and the street light to its right that is dwarfed by the giant tree.

Posted in Monochrome

Pixel Pie

January 16, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Pixel Pie © Harold Davis

When I was a kid growing up in the east they used to have “snow days”—when school was called on account of snow. You went back to bed, covered your head with the blankets, forgot about homework, and looked forward to a blissful day playing in the snow.

What do you do when work is called on account of rain? Part of my answer is to go exploring with my camera in the rain, but when that gets old, I like to play with pixels—in this case LAB channel operations, Photoshop blending modes, mirroring, and reflecting.

Can we count the ways? © Harold Davis

Posted in Photography

Ventura Pier and Dark Sea

January 14, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

It rained all day as I was recording, but towards late afternoon there was a break in the weather. I positioned myself on the roof of a parking garage, and photographed the Ventura Pier. This pier is a great wooden structure, built in 1872, and well maintained since then.

Ventura Pier © Harold Davis

Heading down along the walk beside the beach, the lowering sky again threatened rain. In the gathering darkness I made a fairly long exposure (about thirty seconds) near the Pipeline, a well known Ventura surfing break. I started in on a longer exposure, but the rain really was coming down, so I protected my camera as best I could, and called it a night!

Dark Sea © Harold Davis

Posted in Photography

Workshop and Travel Opportunities—Off to make a new video course!

January 12, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

I’m spending next week near Santa Barbara making a new video course. This one is about the Creative Use of LAB Color in Photoshop. I’ve been scripting and rehearsing the course this past week, and I’m excited to see it come together. I’ve been too “heads-down” on authoring my upcoming course to think about much else, but I do want to bring to your attention some upcoming workshop and travel opportunities:

Garden and Flower Photography, Palm Beach Photographic Centre, Palm Beach, Florida, February 8-10, 2019; click for information and registration. Coming up very soon, and there is still space! This is my first workshop in Florida, and I am looking forward to exploring. Come join me for some great botanical photography!

Photograph Paris in April with Harold Davis (co-host Mark Brokering), April 27-May 5, 2019; explore and photograph the City of Light; Destination Photography Workshop includes several excursions, including after-hours photography exclusive to artists at Monet’s gardens at Giverny. Click here for more information and here for the Reservation Form; what a great time of year to visit Paris with our cameras! I love photographing Paris in black and white and color, and am pleased to be able to offer this destination photography workshop to a select few. There is still time to join us, but if you are interested don’t wait much longer!

Photographing Flowers for Transparency—Covers Harold’s light box and floral photography and post-production techniques; two-day workshop Saturday June 22 and Sunday June 23, 2019 located in beautiful downtown Berkeley, CA. Click here for more information and to register via Meetup. This acclaimed hands-on workshop takes participants through Harold Davis’s Photographing Flowers for Transparency process from beginning to end. There are still a few seats available, but don’t wait too long as this workshop each year has filled up with a waiting list.

Photographing the Great Gardens of Maine, August 11-17, 2019 at Maine Media Workshop. This year we’ll have a great range of public and unique private gardens to photograph. Registration is now available! Click here for more information and registration.

Northern Morocco Photography Adventure, October 19-30, 2019 (12 Days and 11 Nights), cost is $3,200 per person. Click here for the Prospectus and FAQ, here for the complete Itinerary, and here for the Reservation Form. This small, select group (maximum 12) is starting to fill, so prepare for the photographic adventure of a lifetime!

Double Rainbow over Paris © Harold Davis

Posted in Workshops

Harold’s LAB Color Action: New Version Available

January 11, 2019 by Harold Davis | 4 Comments

My Abstraction © Harold Davis

I am feeling smug that I still have some decent computer skills. The last time I updated this Photoshop Action (a kind of macro using Photoshop’s internal scripting language) was a decade ago, for the publication of The Photoshop Darkroom.

The updated Action (Version 01.09.2019) contains some new usability features such as better labeling and hotkey access, and two new LAB color adjustments included in the palette. Click here to download the Readme file for Harold’s LAB Color channel adjustment action, and here to download the zip file containing Harold’s LAB action.

My LAB Color Action is free to download for personal use. For detailed instructions regarding creative LAB color and how to best use this action, stay tuned for the new Creative LAB in Photoshop course I am doing for Lynda.com/Linked In Learning.

Fractal Faces Collage © Harold Davis

Posted in Photography

Before the LAB Color Creates

January 8, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

I’m using this image as one of the starting examples for the new course I am recording next week on working with creative LAB color in Photoshop. Click here for my existing online courses!

Posted in Photography, Workshops

Marble, Don’t Jump!

January 6, 2019 by Harold Davis | 2 Comments

The marble languidly perches on the cornice of the volumes of the collected New Yorker cartoons, high above the carpet. “Marble, don’t jump, ” I cry, as I spring into action with my new Laowa 24mm f/14 2X Macro Probe.

One of my first impulses when I started to learn to use this unique but totally weird lens was to put it up the central cylinders of flowers, with some results from a Calla Lily shown below. What I think I’m learning as I go along is that this lens is really about providing an ant-eye view of the world: incredibly close, wide angle, and able to fit into really tight places, and not necessarily the angle of view one would expect.

Related story (from 2006, using more conventional macro gear): Spadix.

Posted in Photography

A Tale of Three Flower Workshops

January 2, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

I am giving three flower-related photography workshops in 2019. I have been asked a number of times how these workshops differ, and how they overlap—so I’d like to make things as clear as possible so that, if you are interested, you can make the right choice.

First, Photographing Flowers for Transparency in June in Berkeley is the only workshop I will be giving that exclusively focuses in depth on my light box techniques.

Here are some more details about how to choose between the workshops:

The three workshops are very different in focus. My annual Photographing Flowers for Transparency workshop here in Berkeley is a studio-and-Photoshop based course in photographing and processing high-key light box images. This is a complex technique, and it is the only technique the workshop covers, with the goal of getting each proficient technically capable of making this style of image on their own.

You can find the full workshop curriculum on the workshop listing page if you scroll down. The short version is that Day 1 is about arranging and photographing flowers on a light box, and Day 2 is about the related post-production. Light box work—photographing flowers for transparency—is all this workshop will cover.

In contrast, the garden and flower photography workshop at the Palm Beach Photography Centre in early February is largely a field photography workshop. We will be photographing gardens and flowers in a variety of local locations, and also exploring a spectrum of studio photography techniques in the studio, along with critiquing work with an eye to improvement and forming an individual style.

The workshop will demonstrate a range of techniques, including light box work, but the light box will only be a small portion of what is covered, just enough to give a taste of the technique.

I believe the workshop description a gives a pretty good idea of what is involved. For me, my first at the Palm Beach Photo Centre, a special feature of this workshop is that it coincides with a workshop led by national photography treasure, Joyce Tenneson, Light Your Creative Spark. Joyce has a thing or two to say about many aspects of photography, including flower photography. We’re hoping to co-lead some joint workshop sessions while we are both there; and, if you’ve already taken a workshop with me, you might consider Joyce’s workshop as an alternative to repeating with me.

I will be giving a third related workshop in 2019, the week of August 11-17, 2019 at Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine, where I have been teaching for a number of years. This will be a five-day workshop on photographing the great gardens of Maine. This year we have lined up some extraordinary public and private gardens to photograph. Besides the field sessions, we will also be sharing work, learning studio floral photography techniques, and exploring how to enrich our individual creativity, and to express the ineffable with flower photography. I’ll post the registration link once it is available.

So, to summarize, the Maine and Palm Beach workshops are comparable, except for where they are given, and the lengths (three days for Palm Beach versus five for Maine). Light box work will be shown in a demo, but this is probably not really enough to master the technique in-depth. The Flowers for Transparency workshop is one I give annually, and is an intensive and immersive experience that has been designed to thoroughly teach my light box techniques (but does not include any field photography or visits to locations).

Obviously, potential workshop participants need to choose what works for them in terms of their own schedule and where they are located geographically, as well as what they are most interested in. For the light box process, come to Berkeley in June. You should expect to photograph some really spectacular gardens in Maine in August with me, and in Florida enjoy February’s special flora in a great location, along with the creative synergy that Joyce and I can create (personally, I would consider just signing up for the Joyce Tenneson workshop if I weren’t teaching at the same time!).

Click here for my Workshops & Events listings.

Posted in Flowers, Photography

Looking forward to 2019—2019 Harold Davis Workshop Schedule

January 1, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

In 2019 I am looking forward to another exciting year, with travel, creative projects, books to deliver, more online courses, and workshops.

If you are interested in my workshops, I particularly want to call your attention to our destination photography group visiting Paris and Monet’s gardens at Giverny in the spring. Also, the weekend Photographing Flowers for Transparency workshop here in Berkeley in June guides you through the technique I have pioneered.

It is not too late to join my Paris group of select photographers, and there is still limited space in the transparency workshop.

May your road carry you into creative growth in 2019, with time to savor the wonder, mystery, and magic of being human, and to foster the creative spark that lives in all of us.

I have come to believe that sometimes simple is best. Who needs gaudy ephemeral things when the world around us presents perfection if we take the time to truly see?

Here’s my 2019 workshop schedule so far, subject to change and to sessions filling up:

Garden and Flower Photography, Palm Beach Photographic Centre, Palm Beach, Florida, February 8-10, 2019; click for information and registration.
Webinar sponsored by Topaz, Tuesday February 19, 2019 at 2PM PT—free with advance registration, registration link TBA.
Photograph Paris in April with Harold Davis (co-host Mark Brokering), April 27-May 5, 2019; explore and photograph the City of Light; Destination Photography Workshop includes several excursions, including after-hours photography exclusive to artists at Monet’s gardens at Giverny. Click here for more information and here for the Reservation Form; please contact us for more information. We look forward very much to photographing Paris in the spring with you!
Photographing Flowers for Transparency—Covers Harold’s light box and floral photography and post-production techniques; two-day workshop Saturday June 22 and Sunday June 23, 2019 located in beautiful downtown Berkeley, CA. Click here for more information and to register via Meetup.
Photographing the Great Gardens of Maine, August 11-17, 2019 at Maine Media Workshop. This year we’ll have a great range of public and unique private gardens to photograph. Registration page and detailed description to come.
Northern Morocco Photography Adventure, October 19-30, 2019 (12 Days and 11 Nights), cost is $3,200 per person. Click here for the Prospectus and FAQ, here for the complete Itinerary, and here for the Reservation Form.