Category Archives: Point Reyes

Long Exposure Waves

May 30, 2021 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

Now that things are opening up, I’ve been thinking about giving a long exposure waves workshop again. It’s been several years since I’ve given this workshop in person and with an ocean at hand.

The idea behind this technique is that with the camera on a tripod even the most violent action of the ocean can be stilled. The results can be an abstraction. Depending on the length of the exposure, the effect can be fairly subtle and attractive, or with really long exposures produce imagery that seems like fields of color. I think this kind of work is great, but it does take some know-how and a great deal of patience to pull-off successfully.

Long Exposure Wave Study 2 © Harold Davis

To make Long Exposure Wave Study 2, shown above, with my camera on a tripod, I added a +4 neutral density filter and a circular polarizer to the front of my lens, and exposed for five minutes at f/29 and ISO 31.

In a Blue Hour, shown below, is a shorter duration exposure. Once again, I had the camera on a tripod and used a polarizer. I exposed for 10 seconds at f/29 and ISO 200.

In a Blue Hour © Harold Davis

My conception of a new, improved Long Exposure Waves workshop is a hybrid format, with an introduction and technical preparation session held over Zoom, followed by a week later an actual in-person session at a photography-friendly beach. We’d follow up after the live session a week or so later on Zoom to review images and discuss technical issues that came up.

Anyhow, in terms of my calendar, I haven’t been able to schedule this workshop yet. There’s just been too much on my plate between family, travel, and existing commitments. But, when I can I will put it on our calendar—you can keep an eye out for it on my Workshops & Events page!

Also posted in Photography, Workshops

My Back Pages

February 27, 2021 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

I spent some time over the last few days going through my archives for 2019, and processing images that I had somehow overlooked. 2019 was, of course, the last pre-pandemic year, and it was interesting on several levels to review my photographic life as it was then.

In this story, a selection of these newly processed 2019 images, starting with a view of the Paris skyline (from a workshop I was leading), through a well-known (and much photographed) ship wreck in Inverness, California, to an impressionistic in-camera-motion (“ICM”) image of a grove of trees in Florida (again, while leading a workshop), and finally a Lensbaby studio image of the legs of a model.

Tour Eiffel and La Defense © Harold Davis

Wreck of the Point Reyes © Harold Davis

Grove © Harold Davis

Legs © Harold Davis

Also posted in Monochrome, Paris, Photography

Waves on Drakes Beach

June 13, 2019 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Today I reprocessed this image of Waves from a while back so that the photo would work for a substantial enlargement. I wanted to keep the soft quality of the breaking waves in the background while sharpening the foreground just a smidgen, all while interpolating the image a bit larger. The tool I used was Topaz A.I. Gigapixel, and I think it (and I) did a fine job.

Waves on Drakes Beach © Harold Davis

Also posted in Photography

First-Order Fresnel Lens at Point Reyes Lighthouse

June 20, 2016 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

This is an image of the first-order Fresnel lens inside the Point Reyes Lighthouse on the western tip of Point Reyes, California. According to the Point Reyes National Seashore website, “the Fresnel lens intensifies the light by bending (or refracting) and magnifying the source light through crystal prisms into concentrated beams. The Point Reyes lens is divided into twenty-four vertical panels, which direct the light into twenty-four individual beams. A counterweight and gears similar to those in a grandfather clock rotate the 6000-pound lens at a constant speed, one revolution every two minutes. This rotation makes the beams sweep over the ocean surface like the spokes of a wagon wheel, and creates the Point Reyes signature pattern of one flash every five seconds.”

First-Order Fresnel Lens at the Point Reyes Lighthouse © Harold Davis

On Saturday evening, my Creative Landscape Photography workshop on Point Reyes was lucky enough to have the lighthouse opened for us. I shot this image handheld with my Nikon D810 and a 16mm digital fisheye lens (the interior space was pretty tight). I used auto-bracketing and burst mode. There were nine exposures, each at ISO 1250 and f/6.3, with shutter speeds ranging from 0.5 of a second to 1/500 of a second.

I combined the exposures using Nik HDR Efex Pro and Photoshop.

Also posted in HDR, Photography

In a Blue Hour

December 9, 2015 by Harold Davis | 3 Comments

Over the weekend on Saturday I led a fun workshop sponsored by the Point Reyes Field Institute on Point Reyes photographing Waves. I had some very enthusiastic participants and I think we all had a good time. It was fun to be leading a workshop so close to home compared to my recent travels, and there is no doubt that Point Reyes National Seashore is a visual resource and national park second to none, no matter how far one might roam.

In a Blue Hour © Harold Davis

I was able to make some of my own images during the course of the workshop, and I found that this year I was mainly interested in created abstractions using longish exposures and motion. The top image, In a Blue Hour, was a ten second exposure, with my camera on tripod. Here’s the full exposure data: 44mm lens, circular polarizer, 10 seconds at f/29 and ISO 200, tripod mounted.

Wave Study © Harold Davis

Wave Study in Color © Harold Davis

The two versions of Wave Study (above) were shot handheld at 1/2 a second. I stopped the camera down to f/22 and used both a polarizer and a neutral density filter to enable the longish exposure despite the day light. The full exposure data is: 300mm, circular polarizer combined with +4 neutral density filter, 1/2 of a second at f/22 and ISO 31, hand held.

Stormy Sea, Point Reyes © Harold Davis

Stormy Sea, Point Reyes (above), was also shot hand held. The full exposure data is: 150mm, circular polarizer combined with +4 neutral density filter, 0.6 of a second at f/29 and ISO 31, hand held.

Related stories from some of the previous Waves workshops in years gone by: Photographing Waves (2014); Photographing Waves (2011); also Faces of the Deep.

Also posted in Landscape, Photography

Ranch on Point Reyes

September 19, 2015 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

On Point Reyes in the spring, I photographed the details of the deteriorating buildings in the historic (but abandoned) D Ranch. Walking back towards my car I turned and saw the ranch buildings against a dramatic sky. There was no choice: I had to pull out my camera and tripod again. The ominous appearance of the clouds was exaggerated by adding a polarizer, and by creating a long exposure by using a neutral density filter.

D Ranch (Black and White) © Harold Davis

I like the image best in black and white, but the color version has some appeal as well.

D Ranch (Color) © Harold Davis

Also posted in Landscape, Monochrome

Historic D Ranch, Point Reyes

May 19, 2015 by Harold Davis | 2 Comments

Point Reyes National Seashore is probably unique among the American National Parks in that this public land is shared with working cattle and dairy ranches. These ranches date from the early 1800s and are very much a part of the history of Point Reyes. Many have been in the same family for generations.

D Ranch, Point Reyes © Harold Davis

Parking my car beside the road, I scrambled down a steep bank, crossed through a tunnel under the road, and found myself in the abandoned out-buildings of D Ranch. The scene shown in the image—a door within a door within a window—with stark contrasts between light exterior wood and dark interior was too good to pass up, so I stopped to make this monochromatic image with my camera on my tripod.

Related story: Monterey Cypress Row on Point Reyes.

Also posted in Monochrome, Photography

Monterey Cypress Row on Point Reyes

May 18, 2015 by Harold Davis | 1 Comment

On my way to teach a weekend Seascapes and Wildflowers workshop at the western tip of Point Reyes, California I stopped to photograph the well-known row of Monterey Cypress trees at the Marconi operations center. This tree tunnel is one of the largest in the world made up of these trees, and marks a historically significant wireless location. Certainly, there is something very dramatic about coming upon these trees standing by themselves in the windswept landscape of Point Reyes.

Memory Lane © Harold Davis

By the way, the workshop was great fun with a truly compatible group of photographers. Many photos were made, participants came from as far away as Florida and New Jersey, and the sense of community that marks the truly successful workshop was indeed present. The workshop base was the historic Coastguard Boathouse, where we were surrounded night and day by elephant seals and sea lions. Thank you Point Reyes Field Institute for hosting this—and many other—memorable workshops over the years!

Here’s an iPhone capture from the classroom window at the Boathouse of the ramp used to guide out rescue boats when the place was operational, with the window cloudy with salt spray.

Coastguard Boathouse Window © Harold Davis

Also posted in Landscape, Monochrome

Photographing the Point Reyes boat with my iPhone and the Waterlogue app

April 4, 2015 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

Over the years, I have photographed the beached and slowly decaying Point Reyes trawler, located near Inverness, California, by starlight and by daylight in the afternoon. This photo was by iPhone, made while my boys clambered over the wrecked vessel.

Point Reyes Boat © Harold Davis

Photographed on my iPhone, and processed on my phone on the spot with the nifty Waterlogue app. Here’s another one:

Point Reyes Boat 2 © Harold Davis

Also posted in iPhone, Photography

Photographing Waves

December 22, 2014 by Harold Davis | 5 Comments

Waves are a fundamental form of the universe. Light and sound come in waves. Wave formation underlies much that we know, and don’t know, about the universe around us. As manifest in our earth’s ocean, with the forces of gravity, topography and tide made real, they are both orderly and chaotic. Waves have a certain regularity, but no two waves are alike.

Waves, South Beach, Pt Reyes © Harold Davis

I like to photograph waves because they are a fundamental form that underlies what we know as physical reality. A moving wave also gives the photographer the opportunity to exercise the important creative controls inherent in a camera: focus, aperture (depth-of-field), shutter speed (duration of the exposure) and sensitivity (ISO).

Sunset at Point Reyes Head © Harold Davis

Since waves are constantly in motion, what first comes to mind in terms of the camera’s controls is shutter speed. Shutter speed is badly named, because it refers to a duration of time, not a speed: the length of the exposure, in other words how long the photosensitive medium (the sensor) is exposed to light.

A long shutter speed in minutes causes waves to blur and become completely smooth. A very fast shutter speed, measured as a fraction of a second, such as 1/1000 of second, captures an instant of time, and stops the wave in its tracks in all its foaming glory in the moment before it peaks and crashes.

Storm at Sea © Harold Davis

In many ways the most interesting shutter speeds represent an intermediate duration of time: long enough for the wave to blur so that its underlying shape becomes apparent, but short enough to register some of the details of the wave in its progress to the shore. The length of these shutter speeds depends upon the speed of the wave, but tend to be longer than 1/30 of a second and faster than ten seconds.

The wave images shown here were made on the great beach of Point Reyes, California, walking south from the South Beach parking lot in the late afternoon and at sunset, during a workshop I was giving about Photographing Waves.

My camera was on a tripod: even if the waves are in constant motion your camera doesn’t have to be. Each image is a “confection”: a composite, since I always bracket my exposures and capture every piece of an image that I think I might need. There’s always time enough when I am at my computer to figure out how to put the pieces together!

Also posted in Photography

Playing with my boys on Point Reyes

December 2, 2013 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

On the Friday of the Thanksgiving weekend I drove out with my boys—Julian, Nicky and Mathew—to Point Reyes. Nicky’s friend Tamen came along too. It was a balmy, almost summer-like day. As I told people on my recent trip to Japan, we are lucky to live so near such a beautiful, spacious and wild park as Point Reyes National Seashore (many of them couldn’t believe my description in terms of the sheer amount of wild land with so few people near a major city like San Francisco).

We parked at Drake’s Bay, and walked along the beach under towering bluffs at extreme low tide until we reached the Drakes Estoro inlet to the Pacific. We rested a while, built a fort, and the boys splashed in the cold waters of the ocean.

On the way back, at sunset, I stopped to make the images of waves, camera on tripod for long, slow exposures. Meanwhile, I kept a weather eye out to make sure the boys didn’t kill themselves trying to climb the unstable cliffs, or whack each other too hard with driftwood from the beach.

In other words, a good time was had by all, each of us in our own way!

If you are interested in Point Reyes, you might like the Point Reyes category on my blog and Point Reyes and the Marin Headlands, my postcard book. The postcards in this book show scenes from Point Reyes, Drakes Bay, Mount Tamalpais, the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate, and more.

Also posted in Landscape

Swinging under the stars

July 9, 2013 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

The world’s best swing is under an old oak tree on the Bolinas plateau facing the Mount Tamalpais ridge line. It is shown here under the oak tree by starlight with the moon rising, in a six minute exposure.

Also posted in Landscape, Monochrome

On Duxbury Reef

December 25, 2012 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

A monster low tide occurred at the same time as the early winter sunset. Taking advantage of this conjunction, a friend and I wandered out on Duxbury Reef. Duxbury Reef, shown in the linked story from above, is one of the largest shale reefs in North America. It lies west of Bolinas in Marin County on California’s north central coast, and north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, within Point Reyes National Seashore.

Like Atlantis lost beneath the waves, the landscape you see in this image is usually far beneath the water. In fact, as sunset quickly turned to darkness we hurried off Duxbury Reef ahead of the massive oncoming tidal surge. Our route off the reef took us through arched tunnels normally hidden by the ocean, and past the feet of massive cliffs to the footpath at Agate Beach Park.

Exposure data: 35mm, four exposures at shutter speeds from 2 seconds to 2 minutes, each exposure at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted; exposures combined in Photoshop.

Comment: I used the 2 second exposure to capture the sunset colors, and the 2 minute exposure to capture the much darker foreground of the reef. The exposures were combined using layers, a layer mask, and a gradient. The longer exposure also allowed me to create the attractive fog-like effect, derived from the action of the water in motion.

Also posted in Landscape, Photography

Scale

December 13, 2012 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

One of the most powerful tools we have as photographers is the ability to manipulate the viewer’s sense of scale. Why does this matter?

When the viewer first looks at an image they look to think they have have correctly assessed the contents. If, in fact, they realize they have not, or they sense ambiguity in the subject—as in, “What exactly am I looking at?”—the result is a double-take.

Low Tide at Drakes Beach by Harold Davis—Click to view larger

This double-take leads directly to a clean slate. By misdirecting the viewer, we have given them the chance to view some portion of the world with new eyes. This means showing people something in a way they haven’t seen before—which is the goal of much photography.

Case in point: I shot the image above on a rock at low tide in the intertidal zone at Drakes Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore, CA. For all the world it looks like a vast landscape from above, but as soon as the caption is noted the viewer will automatically adjust scale and visual expectations.

Also posted in Abstractions

Harold Davis Postcard Books

March 15, 2012 by Harold Davis | 0 Comments

We are very pleased to announce that Cameron + Company has released three postcard books of my work. Each of the three postcard books each contain twenty detachable postcards. They are high-quality productions on thick matte stock. These postcard books are sold through gift shops, card stores, and bookstores, and retail for $9.95 each.

Yosemite Dreaming: Postcards in this book show Yosemite in winter, Vernal and Nevada Falls, Mirror Lake, Yosemite Valley, the view from Inspiration Point, and more.

Point Reyes and the Marin Headlands: Postcards in this book show scenes from Point Reyes, Drakes Bay, Mount Tamalp;ais, the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate, and more.

Classic California: The black and white postcards in this book show scenese from Big Sur, Joshua Tree National Park, Owens Valley, the Eastern Sierras, the San Francisco area, Yosemite, and more.