Category Archives: Writing

Announcing New Saturday Webinars

Phyllis and I are very excited to announce a new series of Saturday webinars! We hope to see you there.

Intimate Flowers on Saturday, August 15, 2020: August is here! We have flowers! Let’s forget about the world at large and make some intimate joy with intimate landscapes and colors of the flowers of summer! Read more…Click here to register for this webinar.

Intimate Iris © Harold Davis

Webinar Noir on Saturday September 19, 2020: Noir evokes black and white films of the 1940s with “dames”, private eyes in fedoras, low-key lighting, and harsh shadows. More generally, a sense of “noir” has come to mean a range of stylish black and white techniques. Read more…Click here to register for this webinar.

Chorus of One © Harold Davis

Photography and Writing | Using Your Words to Become a Better Photographer on Saturday, October 3, 2020: Writing has always had an important role in relationship to my photography. Not only have I “used my words” to introduce and explain images and techniques, but writing has also helped me to tease out the meaning in my own work, and to understand and explore what I need to do next with my art. Read more…Click here to register for this webinar.

Circumflex © Harold Davis

Patterns, Abstractions, and Composition on Saturday October 17, 2020:  In a very real sense, creating a photograph is an act of intentional design. The photograph presents a transformation of the subject so that it fits within a specific frame. Meticulous use of patterns, and understanding the boundary conditions where patterns begin and end, is crucial to this act of design. Read more…Click here to register for this webinar.

Patterns in Glass 3 © Harold Davis

Patterns in Glass 3 © Harold Davis

Finding the Mysterious in Photography on Saturday October 24, 2020: As nights grow longer and days shorter, and as we approach Halloween and All Saints’ Eve, separations between our world and that of the spirits gets thinner. Some of the very best photographs send a frisson of the spooky and the ineffable up our spine. Read more…Click here to register for this webinar.

World on Fire © Harold Davis

Also posted in Photography, Workshops

Creative Garden Photography eBook and pre-order now available from the publisher (with discount code)

We are very excited that Creative Garden Photography: Making Great Photos of Flowers, Gardens, Landscapes, and the Beautiful World Around Us is now available directly from the book’s publisher, Rocky Nook. Just to clarify, the eBook is available right now, and the book itself can be pre-ordered. Enter the discount code GARDEN40 for a 40% discount before checking out.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the publisher’s eBook comes in a number of formats, so you can read it on your Kindle, and also as a PDF (which preserves pagination and formatting) as you prefer. Also, many of my students how told me how much they enjoy having both an electronic version, for use in the field on their devices, and the “real thing”: a beautifully designed and produced 360-page book with flaps and printed images. I like to think our new book is one step away from the coffee table, but with a great deal of useful information.

The good news is that Rocky Nook offers a bundle so that (particularly if you consider the discount) there is really only a few dollars more for getting the electronic version in addition to the printed book. (If I had to only get one or the other, I’d advise the “book book”—but then, I am a book person!)

Click here to buy Creative Garden Photography: Making Great Photos of Flowers, Gardens, Landscapes, and the Beautiful World Around Us directly from the publisher.

Also posted in Photography

The Making of Creative Garden Photography | Free Webinar

Our new book Creative Garden Photography has been at least ten years in the making from conception to finished production files. In this free webinar, on Sunday July 5, 2020 at 11am PT, Phyllis and I will be joined by Rocky Nook associate publisher Ted Waitt. We’ll take a look at the images in the book, the ideas behind the book, the techniques the book covers, some of the stories told in the book, book production, how the book design relates to garden design as well as photography, and answer questions from the audience. A discount code for book and eBook purchases from the publisher will be provided.

The webinar is free, but registration in advance is required. Click here to register for the Creative Garden Photography webinar.

We have a number of technique webinars coming up that I hope you’ll find useful. You can find the complete list of webinars by clicking here, and below. Recordings of our past webinars can be found in the Harold Davis Photography YouTube channel. You’ll also find live events (I don’t currently have any scheduled until 2021 due to the pandemic) on this page.

I am particularly excited to be sharing stories and images from the Camino de Santiago on Saturday, July 18. This is a free webinar, but requires registration. Click here for more info.

  • Printing, Proofing, and all about Paper with Moab Masters Scott Barrow, Harold Davis, and Jim Graham [Benefits Equal Justice Initiative] | Thursday September 24, 2020 at 10am PT click here for registration. Seats are limited. Click here for details.
  • Master Photographer Panel with Jennifer King and Alan Shapiro, moderated by Harold Davis [Benefits NAACP] | Saturday October 10, 2020 at 11am PT click here for registration. Seats are limited. 
  • Master Photographer Panel with Anne Belmont and Bryan Peterson, moderated by Harold Davis [Benefits Center for Policing Equity] | Saturday November 14, 2020 at 11am PT click here for registration. Seats are limited. 
Giverny Afternoon © Harold Davis

Giverny Afternoon © Harold Davis

Also posted in Flowers, Photography

Looking Backward

“It’s tough to predict things, particularly about the future,” as baseball catcher and American wit Yogi Berra said. And, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” in a quotation attributed with small variations to George Santayana, Edmund Burke, and George Orwell. To which author Kurt Vonnegut responded, “I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”

Deadhorse Point © Harold Davis (Feb 2020)

Deadhorse Point © Harold Davis (Feb 2020)

Looking Backward, a famous novel by Edward Bellamy, was not a look backwards, despite the title, borrowed for this blog story. It’s a Utopian attempt to look forward 112 years from 1888 via the protagonist-in-a-trance trope, when the United States was mired in an era of deep unrest, inequality, and economic insecurity, to the year 2000, when the country had become a socialist paradise (as if!).

For me, looking backward even three months, let alone 112 years, is very strange. Three months ago, in mid February, I was free-range traveling-the-American-west photographer. After enjoying teaching at a wonderful, and probably historically unique, photography conference in Yosemite, I spent some time in Death Valley with my friend Julian from Germany, then drove west, and met another friend, Eric, in Escalante, Utah. We spent some time exploring the back-country there, as well as Arches and Canyonlands around Moab, before taking the long road home.

Earth Ramparts © Harold Davis (Feb 2020)

Earth Ramparts © Harold Davis (Feb 2020)

I had no idea what was “coming down the pike,” as I think most of us did not. My forward plans were focused on upcoming travel to Europe and a trek on the Camino de Santiago (come to think of it, that would have been right about now in a hypothetical alternative universe in which the pandemic was contained and isolated in Wuhan).

So as I get around to processing some of my photos from only a short while ago, it is easy to see how much I didn’t know then. Knowing how little I knew then, it is still no less hard to know where things go now. After all, it’s tough to predict things, particularly about the future. I can hope for a better world, with more justice, equality, common sense, and a vaccine—but those of us who make it to the world of the future will see what actually has transpired.

Also posted in Coronavirus times, Photography

Photo Challenge: How to Capture and Photograph Bottled Light

I will be leading a photography challenge on behalf of the Out of Chicago Live! World Online Photography Conference on Tuesday April 21 at 10AM PT. This is a free event, and anyone can watch the livestream using this link.

Seeing Rothko through a bottle.

PHOTO CHALLENGE
How to Capture and Photograph Bottled Light with Harold Davis

Tuesday, April 21st, 10am PT

How creative can get you get with colored liquid, sunshine, some glass bottles, and a camera? In this challenge, Harold will show you how he used these simple materials to come up with entire new worlds, recreations of Mark Rothko paintings, abstractions, highways at night, and much more! Even if you don’t have any food color sets around, you probably have colored liquid (soda pop, brandy, maple syrup, cherry juice, red wine, and blue Gatorade all work well). Be creative! What can you do while sheltering in place with these everyday materials?

Click here to watch the live stream at 10am Pacific Time on Tuesday, April 21st.

Harold Davis
Harold Davis is a 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. To learn more about him, click here.

Out of Chicago LIVE! brings together over 70 world-class photographers online for one weekend to share with you what inspires them most. Be part of a very special event with 3 days of LIVE! instructor guided learning with 100+ interactive sessions, including panel discussions, tutorials, individual photo challenges and group image reviews. To learn more and register for the full conference and participate in all the challenges, click here.

Also posted in Photography

Ten things to make me happy come the Zombie Apocalypse

  • Toilet paper. Who really cares? I don’t. Folks will generally find a way to clean their you-know-whats. Feel superior (but still kindly and compassionate) to folks obsessing about TP.
  • In a Zombie Apocalypse you don’t have to drive the kids to school, or pick them up.
  • There’s no need to get dressed for meetings during a Zombie Apocalypse, at least below the waist. You can wear your bedroom slippers all day, if you’d like.
  • A Zombie Apocalypse is a great time to finish all those creative projects you have on hold.
  • Staying at home is good for gardening, and for flower photography.
  • Coffee. We have a blend from Scarlet City Roasting that is guaranteed to see us through the Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Keto-friendly chocolate. I have a box of very low carb chocolate bars coming from the Good Chocolate Company. This delicious chocolate is actually pretty good for you even if you are staying away from sugar. Discount code: STAYHOMEWITHCHOCOLATE.
  • I know we won’t go nuts because we get nuts delivered quickly and in certified gluten-free style from Nuts.com.
  • All the inspirational musicians playing from home on YouTube every day. Particularly Mary Chapin Carpenter.
  • Cleaner air. This is a wonderful thing, and should make us all plan to have cleaner air without a pandemic.

Okay, so there are actually eleven things: last, but hardly least, staying home and spending time with my wonderful family!

Point Bonita Lighthouse © Harold Davis

Point Bonita Lighthouse © Harold Davis

Also posted in Coronavirus times

This Too Shall Pass—and What Then?

This too shall pass. It will take some time. Perhaps far longer than we’d like, and there will be tragic losses. The changes that will be wrought will be more fundamental and wide-ranging than most people realize at this point in time.

Civilization © Harold Davis

Civilization © Harold Davis

A new society will arise from the ashes. Let’s not give into the forces of authoritarianism and evil. Let’s use this as a learning experience to implement:

  • Universal health care
  • Less of a gap between rich and poor
  • More, better, and different education
  • More reflection and thoughtfulness about the way resources are shared and distributed
  • Practicing kindness, empathy, and communal feeling, along with respect for the individual

Of course, not everyone will agree with me about the new world we should build. But let’s take the silver lining in the cloud, and create a new order that appreciates art, and is gentler and more thoughtful.

Related stories: Love in the Time of the Coronavirus and Shopping in the Time of the Coronavirus.

Cycle of Life © Harold Davis

Cycle of Life © Harold Davis

Also posted in Coronavirus times

Shopping in the Time of the Coronavirus

Shopping in the time of the Coronavirus starts with questions. How safe is it to go shopping? What is the risk-reward profile? Where are we on the curve of the pandemic?

What will be in stock? How long will the line to get in be? Will the store enforce the mandatory six-feet of separation? And, most of all, will someone sneeze and infect me (infecting my family, with me as the unintentional vector)?

We are shopping for eight people.

The logistics of hygiene are formidable. We have N-95 masks in the car and a box of nitrile gloves. I leave everything at home that is non-essential to avoid having to wipe down anything extra.

We get up early and dress in clothes that will be easy to strip for washing before reentering the house. My wedding ring comes off, and stays home.

We are ninjas. Queue the Mission Impossible music. We will rise before dawn and get there before the line.

When we get there, the line already snakes around the parking lot. There’s confusion, cars trying to drive through the line of people, a few outliers trying to cut into line.

Inside the store there’s a drive like a cattle stampede or a quickly darting shoal of fish, most wearing strange masks and gloves, towards the paper products. We are there early, in the special hours for old people, but there isn’t any toilet paper.

Come the Zombie Apocalypse I would consider going for the chocolate and cognac. It’s not clear to me that extra-soft TP would be my top priority.

The wine aisles are ransacked. There are no beans of any sort. There’s one box of UHT milk, one chicken pack, and one nasal-spray pack per party.

We spend close to a thousand dollars, and consider it money well spent. We are of course lucky to have it to spend this way.

Like the folks that locked themselves in a deep mine for 5,000 years to survive catastrophe in Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, we are considering locking our garden gate behind us until this is all over.

Clematis with Friends (Inversion) © Harold Davis

Clematis with Friends (Inversion) © Harold Davis

Except this is probably a fantasy.

Before leaving the parking lot, car door handles get wiped down with bleach, and gloves come carefully off and into a trash can.

Dropping some of the food off at my parents’ house, I leave their case of wine in the carport. We carry the food up to the front door and wave through the glass, leaving quickly so as not to risk any contact when they open the door.

They are querulous. They prefer fresh fruit and produce to the frozen stuff (who doesn’t?), and have been avoiding tuna and swordfish up to now because of mercury. Later, I’m told the tuna tastes good (at least it doesn’t have good taste, as the ad from my childhood declaimed), but I am sure they still are concerned about the mercury and too polite to say so.

In their nineties, my parents have been thrust into this new, impossible world. I feel that a bit of grumpiness is perfectly appropriate.

As one gets older, I do think that change is more difficult, and that it is harder to be flexible.

The only places I’ve ever personally seen food shortages and lines like this are in Cuba and Haiti.

Next stop is home. We do the hygiene protocol in reverse. Doors were left unlocked on latch. We bring the stuff into the kitchen, being careful to not let the kids touch it to help carry, even though they are eager to help.

The 50lb bag of sushi rice feels like it weighs fifty pounds at least when I carry it in. Good thing I’ve been practicing those farmer carries.

We go round to the front and strip buck naked. Everything is off, including shoes.

Then it’s into the shower, wash everything including hair and under nails, back into the kitchen. Unload everything out of cartons, squash the cartons into recycle, wash down again, and package the food into fridge, freezer, and pantry.

The past has gone irrevocably. This is the present. The future hasn’t come into focus yet. There are forks on the road ahead.

Road Less Traveled by Harold Davis

Road Less Traveled © Harold Davis

Also posted in Coronavirus times, Photography

Love in the Time of the Coronavirus

Two of the best books I know that involve pandemics are the well-known classics Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Both involve great scourges of humanity through the ages, cholera and bubonic plague.

I think of Márquez’s book as an intellectual’s romantic parable about several kinds of love, in which the eponymous cholera plays a symbolic role to remind the reader that lovesickness is a disease, too.

But A Journal of the Plague Year has specific resonance with our times, and it gave me nightmares after I first read it many years ago. The narrative is apparently non-fictional, eye witnessed, and journalistic. When Defoe wrote his account in the 1720s, the last major bubonic plague was still within living memory in the late 1600s, although the narrator presents it as contemporaneous. In this fictional non-fictional account, grass grows in the once-busy streets of London, specific neighborhoods are traced as they succumb to plague, and the dead lie unnamed in vast Potter’s fields that remind one of the aerial views today of graves in Iran.

It’s more than possible that Defoe’s opus was propaganda-for-hire, intended to bolster the case in the 1720s for stronger protectionism and border controls. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

“May you live in interesting times” is apocryphally quoted as a Chinese curse, and these are truly times that would be more comfortable to learn about from a history book than to live through.

In this regard, as the Wizard Gandalf famously notes in the Lord of the Rings, we don’t really get to decide what time we live in: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Trying times bring out the worst in people. I am thinking right now of those who would bend the knee to the false God of money over the lives of people. But difficult times also bring out the best in people, heroes who care for others, such as the selfless front-line medical workers in the coronavirus pandemic, who are dying at an awful rate.

Tulips that Were © Harold Davis

Tulips that Were © Harold Davis

In a very real sense, nature just doesn’t care. Through years spent hiking in the mountains from Alaska to Maine, I’ve learned that, however much one loves nature and loves being in nature, you just have to take nature as an extrinsic force that cannot be reasoned with. A storm at sea or a fall in the mountains can kill you perfectly, and without an iota of consciousness.

Anthropomorphism of the natural life force is, I believe, a mistake—unless intended as a metaphor. I’ve seen small blood-sucking leaches beside the trail in the jungles of Vietnam, blindly casting about for any warm-blooded creature, not because the leach is mean and ornery, but because that is what the leach does. This is much like the coronavirus infectious particle. It just seems evil to us, but it is merely doing what it does.

We are sheltering in place, a family of six. My parents, in their nineties, are alone in their own isolation behind glass doors. We bring them groceries; leave them outside the doors, wave kisses, and depart. They know that because of their age if they are hospitalized they will be the first to be sacrificed to triage, and offered palliation only.

Shopping is an excruciating experience of mask and glove protocol. We are allowed out for an exercise walk provided we keep six feet away from other people. This turns into an awkward social dance where pleasantries about “hanging in there” are exchanged while we subliminally jockey to see who will yield the right-of-way first.

These are the worst of times, and the best of times. I am at home with those I love more than anyone else in the world, my family. And, this too shall pass.

Once long ago when I traversed the Brooks Range in Alaska solo in deep fear for my life I was granted a vision that let me know I would be safe.

I was reminded of this when a few nights ago, deep in an anxiety dream about a vast car crash in which I was a passenger, the car I was in on a freeway swirled round and round in slower and slower spirals. I kept waiting for the fatal crash, but it never came. Instead, I heard a voice: “You will be okay.”

We will be okay.

Tulips that Were (Inversion) © Harold Davis

Tulips that Were (Inversion) © Harold Davis

Also posted in Coronavirus times

My life story in and out of photography along my road less traveled

Harold Davis: Self portrait with moustache

Self Portrait with Moustache © Harold Davis

In Guest Blog Post: Photographer as Poet Harold Davis I write that selfies are silly and that photography is poetry. I also tell some of my life story in and out of photography along my road less traveled. Check it out!

Road Less Traveled by Harold Davis

Road Less Traveled © Harold Davis

Also posted in Photography

PhotoActive Podcast Interview with Harold Davis

PhotoActive has featured an interview with me in their podcast, Episode 50: Harold Davis Creative Black & White. If you enjoy the chat I have on the podcast with my interlocutors Jeff Carlson and Kirk McElhearn (thanks guys!), you might also find their discussion with Michael Kenna of interest.

Podcast Description: Artist, photographer, and writer Harold Davis joins us to discuss his new book Creative Black & White, 2nd Edition, and we talk about the photographer as artist, and how to see the world in monochrome.

Clematis © Harold Davis

Clematis © Harold Davis

Click here for more about Clematis.

Nesting Bowls and a Nautilus Slice © Harold Davis

Nesting Bowls and a Nautilus Slice © Harold Davis

Click here for more spirals!

My book, Creative Black & White, 2nd Edition, is now available. The publisher, Rocky Nook, is offering a 40% discount. Click here to buy Creative Black & White 2nd Ed directly from the publisher. Use the code “HDAVIS40” [no quotes] at checkout to apply the discount (you can also use my discount code for all other Rocky Nook books, by the way!).

Here are the links for my book on Amazon.com and on B&N as well, so the choice of supplier is yours. I appreciate your positive and thoughtful reviews on Amazon!

Free Webinar: Creative Black and White Opportunities

Please join me for a free webinar about Black and White creative opportunities. The webinar is scheduled for Tuesday August 29 at 11AM PT, with free registration on a first-come-first-served basis. Click here to register for my webinar, which is sponsored by Rocky Nook, the publishers of my new book.

In this webinar, I will discuss tips and tricks related to digital black and white photography, and will include material on LAB inversions, solarization techniques, the Karl Blossfeldt effect, and x-ray imaging.

My new book, Creative Black & White, 2nd Edition, is now available. The publisher, Rocky Nook, is offering a 40% discount. Click here to buy Creative Black & White 2nd Ed directly from the publisher. Use the code “HDAVIS40” [no quotes] at checkout to apply the discount (you can also use my discount code for all other Rocky Nook books, by the way!).

Here are the links for my book on Amazon.com and on B&N as well, so the choice of supplier is yours.

Click here to register for my webinar, which is sponsored by Rocky Nook, the publishers of my new book.

Also posted in Photography

My Artist Statement

Mountains on the Beach © Harold Davis

Mountains on the Beach © Harold Davis

I haven’t reviewed the Artist Statement I wrote a number of years back for quite a while, and I recently had cause to take another look at my statement. I’m pleased that my Artist Statement stills speaks of me, and for me. Here’s the gist of it (you can read my full Artist Statement by clicking here):

My work lies at the intersections of many styles and disciplines: between east and west, classicism and modernism, photography and painting, and the new technologies of the digital era versus the handcraft traditions of the artisan. To understand my imagery, one needs to see where it fits within each of these dichotomies.

Before I explain, let me mention that my primary goal is not to evoke academic, scholarly, or pedantic understanding. I’d almost rather my work not be understood–so that the response is evoked on a primal level that has more to do with the heart and gut than the intellect.

A great deal of thought goes into my work, but it shouldn’t have to take thought to enjoy it. At the simplest level I am trying to evoke–at both conscious and unconscious levels–a sense of serenity, wholeness, and wonder. My work can be experienced and enjoyed simply and organically for its structure and beauty.

With many of my images, unwrapping the sense of wholeness that the work conveys is not immediate. I am asking someone experiencing my images to have the patience to contemplate–and perhaps resolve a visual puzzle–but I don’t necessarily let on upfront that my viewers will be confronting a conundrum. 

I believe that advances in the technology and craft of digital photography have created an entirely new medium. My years of contemplation have opened my eyes and my heart, and taught me to see more deeply. I use this alchemy of wonder to combine the traditions of painting and photography with new technology.

Read more.

Panorama of the Kumano Sanzen Roppyaku Po © Harold Davis

Panorama of the Kumano Sanzen Roppyaku Po © Harold Davis

Creative Black and White 2 Ed Now Available (with Discount Code!)

I’m very pleased that my new book, Creative Black & White, 2nd Edition, is now available. The publisher, Rocky Nook, is offering a 40% discount. Click here to buy Creative Black & White 2nd Ed directly from the publisher. Use the code “HDAVIS40” [no quotes] at checkout to apply the discount (you can also use my discount code for all other Rocky Nook books, by the way!).

Here are the links for my book on Amazon.com and on B&N as well, so the choice of supplier is yours.

If you like Creative Black & White, 2nd Edition, I would really appreciate a thoughtful review. Thanks!

Creative Black & White has been revised, substantially expanded, and brought up to date.  I’ve added entire sections, substantially enlarged the book (it is 80 pages longer than the first edition), and most of the photos are new. Every photo includes information about how it was made, both from a technical perspective, and also the story about my thinking behind the image.

As I note in the Preface to this Second Edition, “Of course, I was flattered to be asked to write this revised and expanded second edition of Creative Black & White. One of the goals of this new edition is to bring the tools and techniques explained in this book up to date. This is particularly important in the realm of Lightroom and Photoshop software, and with the plug-ins that are a necessary extension of the Adobe ecosystem.

“Beyond keeping current, I want to help you become a better and more creative photographer, whatever your interest level or toolset may be.”

It’s been great fun updating this book, making a good book even better, refreshing the images, and bringing the software explanations up to date. I hope my new book proves to be inspiring and useful to you!

Click here to buy my book from Rocky Nook (please use the HDAVIS40 discount code for your discount), here for my book on Amazon, and here on Barnes & Noble.

Also posted in Monochrome, Photography

Creative Black and White 2nd Edition eBook Now Available

We’re very excited about the second edition of Creative Black & White.  The eBook is now available for purchase and download (the actual “book book” will follow in a month or two). Creative Black & White has been revised, substantially expanded, and brought up to date. You can buy the eBook now from Amazon or directly from the publisher. I’ve added entire sections, substantially enlarged the book, and most of the photos are new. Every photo includes information about how it was made, both from a technical perspective, and also the story about my thinking behind the image.

As I note in the Preface to this Second Edition, “Of course, I was flattered to be asked to write this revised and expanded second edition of Creative Black & White. One of the goals of this new edition is to bring the tools and techniques explained in this book up to date. This is particularly important in the realm of Lightroom and Photoshop software, and with the plug-ins that are a necessary extension of the Adobe ecosystem.

“Beyond keeping current, I want to help you become a better and more creative photographer, whatever your interest level or toolset may be.”

It’s been great fun updating this book, making a good book even better, refreshing the images, and bringing the software explanations up to date. I hope my new book proves to be inspiring and useful to you!

Click here to buy the eBook now from Amazon and click here to buy it directly from the publisher.