Harold Davis's Blog, page 10

Iris Suite

I have been photographing Irises close-up and personal. Irises are wonderful flowers, and I come back to them quite a bit. With these images, I used a simple setup with a light box for back lighting. In some cases, I used only the back lighting, and in others I added a small LED ring light to illuminate from the front. These images are all fairly extreme macro range, from 1:1 going as close as 2:1, or twice life size.

I am thinking about creating a small portfolio of Iris images.

Iris Window © Harold Davis Spectral Iris © Harold Davis Pillars of Iris © Harold Davis Iris Runway © Harold Davis Iris Yellow Line © Harold Davis Iris Chalice © Harold Davis Iris Stigma © Harold Davis

Unzip My Petal Heart

First, there was the business of hearts. Hearts are not to be taken lightly. They never are: hearts can be broken, lost, found, and mended. Always pay attention to who and what you love!

I started creating a light box image shaped liked the cliche Hallmark heart (perhaps I’ll post this larger image in the due fullness of time). Then, thanks to serendipity, I noticed a small Tulip petal roughly shaped like a heart. I played with the small petal heart, placing it on top and internally in relation to the larger heart composition.

Finally, it occurred to me to get out a macro lens, and photograph the petal on its own. Clearly, the resulting petal heart shape—or was it a sweater?— needed a zipper. I had to oblige. Phyllis helped me find a zipper from a sewing supply catalog, we pinned it to a white foamcore board in roughly the shape of the zipper in the finished image you see, and I photographed the zipper, push-pins and all.

Unzip My Petal Heart © Harold Davis

Next, I combined the petal heart image with the zipper image in Photoshop. The result, in my Impossible Images series, is sort of my answer to the so-called “artificial intelligence” image creation craze: by hand, in digital post-production, using layers and masking, the old-fashioned way!

Note: There is an Easter Egg in the image. Can you find it?

Warm wishes for a Joyous New Year!

Nurture your creative garden and watch it bloom in 2024! With best wishes for the New Year from our family to yours.

Looking Backwards: 2013-2023

As an exercise in self-image review, I began compiling my Best of 2023 image list, as I do annually. While creating my image list, I noticed that this will make ten years: with the new 2023 list, I have been posting my idiosyncratic best lists from 2013 through 2023. You can click here to find links to the 2013-2023 lists.

Not that these are all my images, or even the “best” ones—they are merely the images that tickle my fancy at the time of compilation.

Looking at all ten years, I immediately thought I need to compile a “best-of-the-best” list. Click here for my “Best of the Decade” compilation, with about seven images per year.

For me, the thrill is always in creation, not retrospection. Looking backwards is a way to look forwards. The best is yet to come!

Leica IIIc and Butterflies © Harold Davis

 

Looking Backwards

As an exercise in self-image review, I began compiling my Best of 2023 image list, as I do annually. While creating my image list, I noticed that this will make ten years: with the new 2023 list, I have been posting my idiosyncratic best lists from 2013 through 2023. You can click here to find links to the 2013-2023 lists.

Not that these are all my images, or even the “best” ones—they are merely the images that tickle my fancy at the time of compilation.

Looking at all ten years, I immediately thought I need to compile a “best-of-the-best” list. Click here for my “Best of the Decade” compilation, with about seven images per year.

For me, the thrill is always in creation, not retrospection. Looking backwards is a way to look forwards. The best is yet to come!

Leica IIIc and Butterflies © Harold Davis

 

Harold Davis—Best of 2023

I’m not sure what the right word for my 2023 year is, perhaps “whirlwind.” Family and personal issues kept me on my toes, and occupied a great deal of my time. Travel was diminished in the first half of the year. In the second half I visited Maine to teach again, and spent an extraordinary month in Japan.

I’ve been making my “personal choice” best-of selections for many years, going back to 2013. These annual selections can be found here. My choices are idiosyncratic, based on no discernible criteria whatsoever, and simply are my personal taste. These selections are by no means complete. A more thorough catalog of my work can be found on Flickr, Instagram, and on my blog (but many of my images never get blogged even if I like them).

2023 marks the tenth year of my personal best selections. A decade is a significant amount of time. Expect a “best of the best” selection coming soon, with one image from each of the years!

Here are my 2023 choices.

Orvieto Passage, below, squeaked into 2023, as it was photographed in November 2022 in Umbria, Italy, but I didn’t get a chance to process it until January. 

In the morning the fog was thick. I took advantage of the evocative lighting, and framed an ancient, cobblestone passage by looking (with my camera) through an arch. Read more.

Orvieto Passage © Harold Davis

I created a new garden on the shaded side of our house. This is a mostly ignored narrow strip between our house and the fence that separates us from the sidewalk on the San Ramon side. I anchored this “memorial garden” with three camellia bushes. Read more.

Topography of Camellia © Harold Davis

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 I see in my viewfinder makes my heart pause, and regard the world with gladness despite the sadness that lingers. Read more.

Ranunculus © Harold Davis

I’m not really sure what the image signifies, although of course I have been thinking a great deal lately about life and death, and what it all means. Read more.

Life and Death © Harold Davis

I’ve been working with some wonderful colored Calla Lillies on my light box. Read more.

Garden Party © Harold Davis

Every time I think we’ve removed everything the house disgorges something new—this time a collection of small glass bottles, cowering in a corner. I used these bottles to anchor some flowers from my garden. Fantastic Iris and White Camellia were photographed with my 85mm tilt-shift macro on a white seamless background. Read more.

Fantastic Iris © Harold Davis White Camellia © Harold Davis

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! More.

Glory of the Garden © Harold Davis

With this image, I was pleased to see the form of the image follow (not function) but the name of the flower; you can see why the varietal was thought to resemble the butterfly. Speaking of which, it is good to think of butterflies rising in flight from the chrysalis, just like my website has been forged anew! Read more.

Butterfly Ranunculus © Harold Davis

I’ve stumbled into a new series of flower images. These images have in common the appearance of “artful randomness.”

They are supposed to seem casual and minimally arranged. But the fact is that I create these images from “the ground up” using both a scaffolding and an intermediate structural layer, so the appearance of randomness is just that—an appearance—and there is very little about these images that has been left to chance, whatever chance may be. Read more.

Butterfly Ranunculus and Friends © Harold Davis Music of Irises and Poppies © Harold Davis Falling Flowers © Harold Davis

I have been photographing some stunning white peonies. For this flower, the internal cluster is in a pretty unusual formation. Part of the idea of photographing this flower on the light box is to let the colors of the flowers I have arranged under the petals be refracted up into the image. Read more.

Peonies and Poppies © Harold Davis

Leica IIIc and Butterflies (below) is a composite photo that brings me back to my first photography. I used this camera in college to work fairly crudely in black and white.

Leica IIIc and Butterflies © Harold Davis

Putting together a composition Mandala (White) requires an almost Zen level of concentration, not to mention holding one’s breath and nimble fingers. Read more.

Mandala (White) © Harold Davis

I hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of my 2023 photography journey, mostly said with flowers. This year has been not without challenges for myself and our family, but I always find it worthwhile to review what I’ve done artistically.

Most of my images are available as prints. If you are interested, please let me know.

Check out my self-selected bests from previous years in Best Images Annuals!

Hollyhock Lace

“Lace” in this case seems to have been formed by the operations of time and small insects. Then again, beauty is where you find it. But with this composition there are no crafts-women laboriously creating small masterpieces by hand, as I once found on the Maltese island of Gozo.

I enjoyed re-assembling these Hollyhock leaves and stem. With Northern California’s winter upon us, this simulacrum is likely the only Hollyhock I will see for a number of months until early spring comes early and brings new green growths and flowers!  

Hollyhock Lace © Harold Davis

Macro Photography: The Undiscovered Country

I’ve written about looking through my viewfinder with a macro lens on the camera and navigating a new country. The topography and contours of this “country” are unknown, and it is my job to explore. It’s also my job to present a coherent slice of this jumbled terrain to present to my audience a “landscape” they haven’t seen before.

Proteus I © Harold Davis

After all, collaborating with one’s viewers to show something in a new way is one of the goals of photography, or, dare I say, all art. And where could this be more true than in macro work? Of course, just because something is novel, because I’ve discovered new country in a close-up, doesn’t mean it is interesting or moving. But novel gets attention, and attention is the first step towards deeper meaning and beauty.

Proteus II © Harold Davis

These macro images at not quite 1:1 show a Proteus center, glowing and wet with internally-produced dew drops. I was surprised to see the faint spiral like shape at the center of the system of styles and anthers.

Looking through old family photos

I’ve been looking through and re-photographing old family photos because I am putting together a visual presentation for the memorial event for my parents Martin and Virginia Davis coming up in New York at the end of January 2024.

The studio photo shown below is (I think) a high school graduation photo of my Martin Davis (my Dad) when he graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. His proud parents, Harry and Helen Davis, are behind Martin.

My grandfather Harry Davis was a painter. You can see one of his paintings here.

If you are interested in my full presentation, you can attend in person at New York University on Friday, January 26, 2024, or watch it live-streamed on Zoom (attendance is free for both, but in either case pre-registration is required).

Subversive Metaphoto

I think that “subversive metaphoto” is a mouthful, but I kind of like the phrase. Ponderous? Sure. Pretentious? Double sure. 

But here’s the thing. I spend much time thinking on what photographs are about. Not photographs in general, but specific and individual photographs.

What something is about is a different question from what something means. Meaning can be profound, whereas subject matter, “aboutism”, is merely subject matter. Let’s leave meaning out of it for the time being.

So how can you subvert subject matter? Is the result subversive? And is the subversive photograph by definition a “metaphoto”? In other words, a photo about photography, rather than about the subject matter in the photo.

Osaka Castle © Harold Davis

Which brings me in a roundabout way to my photo of Osaka Castle shown above. 

My photo shows part of the roof-line of the modern reconstruction of the pagoda-like keep (or center) of the vast, double-moat-surrounded castle that was for centuries the locus of military and civil power in the fertile alluvial river delta that became modern Osaka, Japan.

As a background for Instragrammers, Osaka Castle works. Alternatively, you can make a postcard image of Osaka Castle, possibly at sunset. But if neither Instagram nor postcards interest you, then I think one might be stuck. A compositionally interesting image is definitely a “horse of a different color”.

On site, out of visual boredom if nothing else, I choose to tilt my camera diagonally to capture the repetition of the pattern in the decorative roofs. 

Later, reviewing my files, I wondered what this had achieved. What was the photo about? Clearly, while this may not be my most iconic image (note to Harold: certainly it is not your most iconic image), it is different in its angle, rakish but controlled, than the angular viewpoint in most photographs.

And that may be the point, what my photo is about. This is a photograph about photography.

It illustrates that photographers tend to look at their subjects far too head-on. They are scared to shift the camera angle, and scared to play with turning photos sideways in post-production. They shouldn’t be. Off-beat angles of view are often a great possibility, either in capture or in post. As an example, check out my Mountains on the Beach, which was turned sideways from the original capture.

When capturing a photo, look up, look down, look around, and in the words of Composition & Photography, “scootch” (see page 61) [meaning move around and try all kinds of camera positions]. In post, experiment with viewing your images differently: sideways, upside down, or even at a weird angle.