Cycle of Life, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Spring turns to summer, the precise demarcation of the season change lost for me in a haze of books to write, photography in the studio, new Photoshop features to play with, and family matters. Not to mention the oddities of the Pacific weather system in coastal California, where July can easily be chillier with more fog than March or October. In my garden, my beloved poppies are no longer the prime attraction, being swiftly surpassed in sheer gaudiness of coloration by the Dahlias and Echinaceas.

The world moves to a rhythm of its own, and our society has us on a treadmill that only seems to increase in velocity. With four kids, there’s always something to take care of: a doctor to visit, playdate to arrange, or mandatory school affair to show the parental flag at.

But it’s important for me to take the time to sample the tempo of the growing things in my garden. They have a cycle of life that is all their own, as seen in this Papaver Rhoeas photo from early June. The Poppy in the center of the photo is mature, but the one to the upper right has just bloomed, shedding its delicate pod cover onto the petals of the more mature flower. The entire life cycle is compressed into a matter of hours, but seems somehow languid and dreamy if I take the time to observe it closely.

Echinacea Pink Double Delight, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Flower macros are a personal subject that I return to over and over again with great joy. The photo above is an Echinacea Pink Double Delight that I photographed just after a recent rainstorm.

The daffodil in the sunshine (below) is from early 2008. I found the RAW file recently when flipping through my archives, and decided to have some fun converting this simple, sunny image.

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Echinacea purpurea Hope, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This photo shows a Coneflower, Echinacea purpurea ‘Hope’. This a patented hybrid, with a portion of each sale donated by the wholesale growers to the Susan G. Komen For the Cure, a leading organization in the fight against breast cancer.

I’ve been growing exotic hybridized Echinacea to photograph. There’s no way you can get these at a florist, so to photograph them I needed to cultivate them. This was one of my first nice specimens, picked just before the onset of autumn rains.

I photographed the flower using a black velvet background, and bright but overcast daylight from the front and side. The finished image combines 4 captures at shutter speeds from 6 to 30 seconds. Here’s the full exposure data: Nikon D300, 85mm perspective-correcting macro, 4 exposures (6 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds) combined in Photoshop, each exposure at f/64 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

Driving Nicky and Mathew to school this morning in the pouring rain I half-turned to Mathew, and said, “I love you.”

Five-year-old Mathew replied, “I know, Dad.”

I didn’t want to make Nicky feel left out, so I said, “I love you, Nicky.”

“I know, Dad.”

Compared to the vast feeling of love in my heart for these boys this seemed a bit too routine for me. I felt the need to add, “That’s good. It’s important to know you are loved by your father.”

Mathew: “You’re not ‘father.’ You are ‘Dad.'”

Puts me in my place.

Pear Blossom Special, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Obviously, I have a fondness for small aperture, fully stopped-down flower macros that use high depth of field to convey sharpness. (I explain the relationship of aperture to depth of field in Chapter 2 of Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers.) For example, take a look at Echinacea Harvest Moon, Rose Study 11, and Lily in a Green Vase.

But sometimes the high-depth-of-field approach won’t work, either for technical reasons or because having the entire photo sharp doesn’t give the desired visual and aesthetic impact. In fact, selective focus can be so attractive that there are special tools you can use, like the Lensbaby, intended for just this purpose.

The apple and pear blossoms in this pair of photos are espaliered along a fence with our western neighbor. These trees have multiple varieties (five in the case of the apple, three for the pear) grafted onto a single trunk, with the varietal branches spread across the fence. It’s an interesting tangent that any apple you are ever likely to eat will have come from grafted stock rather than seed. Apples seeds simply don’t reliably reproduce, so once you get a good eating apple what you do is reproduce it over and over again by grafting, which essentially means genetic cloning.

I do generally believe that a tripod is the photographer’s best friend. But in this case, the blossoms were high up the fence, so I wasn’t going to able to bring a tripod to bear. Besides, there was a steady breeze. So I made the best of it, and hand held these photos using image stabilization at a fast enough shutter speed so that the subject motion wasn’t much of an issue.

The trick here is to get the plane of the camera as parallel as possible to the area of the subject that you care about. Also, you need to press the shutter release at exactly the right instant, because even slight subject (or camera) movement can spoil the focus. But if all the stars line up, selective focus can make for very nice images.

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[Both photos: Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens, 36mm extension tube, +2 diopter close-up filter, ISO 100, hand held with image stabilization enagaged; Apple: 1/250 of a second at f/8, 95mm (142.5mm in 35mm terms); Pear: 1/160 of a second at f/6.3, 82mm (123mm in 35mm terms)]

Related stories: Cherry Blossom Special; Botany of Desire.

Rose Study 11, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

As everyone knows, roses are associated with seduction and obsession. As Diana Wells puts it, “the rose represents love, magic, hope, and the mystery of life itself.”

My obsession with roses as a gardener was swift and overwhelming, until my small garden was overwhelmed with more roses than could possibly fit. Today, I find myself as a gardener more excited by flowers such as hellebores, echinacea, and protea from South Africa such as my leucospermum.

Obviously, I am still obsessed with photographing roses. Few flowers can equal the rose for beauty of line and shape, not to mention sumptuous coloration.

These two images are two of the studies from my rose photography marathon this week.

The photo above was stopped down to f/40 for maximum depth of field and then underexposed to bring out the tonal richness in the dark red rose.

On the other hand, I overexposed the rose below to emphasize the transparency of the variegated petals.

Now for something different, as I’m off to Yosemite with Julian and Nicky!

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Related link: my Rose set on Flickr.

Escapade, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

I get asked often, “How big is your garden?” With all my photos of flowers, some people assume I have a large garden, and this is not in fact the case. Although even maintaining the smallish, rather urban garden we have is a stretch—a joyful stretch—along with taking care of the three boys, photography, and the rest of life.

Actually, I am tempted to answer the question about the size of my garden in biblical terms: to mutilate John 14:2, around my Father’s house there are many gardens. My garden is dense, with enough to keep me excited about macro flower photography. A kind of large container garden on about 1/3 of an acre.

The fruits and vegetables are in raised beds along the narrow, protected southwestern exposure. The northeastern passage is a path between the house and street, too narrow really to be called a garden, but beautiful in in a secret garden kind of way. The backyard is more-or-less consigned to the kids, their play structures, and vehicles.

I garden to photograph. Only the front garden behind its curved fence is truly mine: I plant poppies, dahlias, roses, echinacea, leucospermum, hellebores—whatever I want to photograph.

My garden has the virtue that it is mine: if I want to put a tripod leg somewhere, clamp a plant, or even cut a flower for studio photography, there is no one to stop me.

“Are all your flower photographs of your own garden?” No, there are many gardens surrounding my Father’s house. Some days, when I have the time, I like to mount my equipment in my pack, tripod on the outside, and head for a good flower photography destination. Very locally, and not in preferential order, Annie’s, Berkeley Hort, Blake Garden, and the UC Berkeley Botannical Garden. I took the photograph of the Escapade Rose (with a little spider) the other day at the municipal Berkeley Rose Garden.

Here’s a photo of a balloon flower from my very own garden:

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