Translucent Flora: Photographs by Harold Davis is an exhibition at the San Francisco Botanical Garden Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture, June – September 2023 Join us for the Artists’…
Having a number of teenagers and twenty-somethings in the house exposes me to some (understandable) pessimism about life, society, and the future. These are indeed strange times. We---and our kids---have…
How wonderful to be photographing flowers from my garden at this time of year when the world comes to life and all the colors glow and are so glorious!
This Rojasianthe superba, sometimes called "White Sunflower Tree," was growing in the entry garden of San Francisco Botanical Garden, where (with permission) I cut this specimen. The seeds of Rojasianthe…
What is love? It is, of course, a "many-splendored" thing: supple, wonderful, wistful, and maybe all of these at once and maybe more. The passionate rush of dopamine when encountering…
I'm proud of our bush Peony. For a toddler---I planted it close to two years ago---it certainly produced a huge and beautiful flower. It's hard to get a sense of…
A great deal of our energy lately has gone into clearing my parents' house to make it ready for sale. This is a thankless task and emotionally very difficult. Fortunately,…
A single blossom from my garden is apparently the essence of simplicity. The power of these images of flower blossoms relies on this apparent simplicity: you are supposedly looking at…
My flowers are like frilly Goddesses. But not in a fey way, or an overly cute way. The textures these blossoms provide could almost be fabrics or garments. The beauty…
In the wake of the death of my parents, I created a new garden on the shaded side of our house. This is a mostly ignored narrow strip between our…
Heading into a new year, I always like to look back through my photography of the waning year to see what I might have overlooked. Here are a few candidates…
These two flower images are fusion X-Rays: one part medical X-Ray combined with one part light box photo. I created them last month in collaboration with my friend Dr Julian…
This image is a pretty straightforward x-ray of a rather small Dahlia blossom. Julian and I made the exposure last week at his radiology practice near Heidelberg. In post-production, I…
I photographed this Helichrysum bracteatum (strawflower) blossom on my light box (far below), then inverted the image in LAB Color, and converted to monochromatic (directly below). I'm headed tomorrow to…
It's fun to use flowers to create animistic shapes on the light box, like good-luck dragons and this "Butter-flower" shown below.
As summer becomes full and the days of July rush by, the dahlias are in bloom. Each dalia is different, a unique world unto itself. Some of them remind me…
Over my garden gate, the Clematis vine is thriving, provided we keep its "feet" moist. Two of the Clematis flowers bloomed together, and I cropped them to make this composition…
In the pre-dawn cool I walked around the house and down to our dahlia bed in the side yard. There was one perfect white blossom. I cropped it, and placed…