Harold Davis's Blog, page 107
June 4, 2017
Shameless Quote Department
“Harold Davis is the digital black and white equal of Ansel Adams’s traditional wet photography. Adams would be awed by Davis’s work. In The Photographer’s Black and White Handbook Davis presents a large number of his photographs, and virtually every one is a masterpiece, ready for gallery or museum exhibit.” —Seattle Book Review, rated five out of five stars and cross-posted in the San Francisco Book Review.
Click here for more “Shameless Quotes”, click here for monochromatic (black & white) images on my blog, and here for current workshop offerings.
White River Falls, Oregon © Harold Davis
June 1, 2017
Design for a Stained Glass Window Made of Flowers
To create this design for a stained glass window, I started by laying down a series of mallow blossoms in a loose spiral (the magenta flowers). Next, I filled in the reverse portion of the spiral with “two-week” iris blossoms, using the three-pronged stamen of the flower as a radial sub-pattern. Finally, I filled in most of the white spaces with “tiger-striped” petals from the alstromerias in our garden. Other than the alstromerias (“Peruvian Lilies”), the pattern is made up of California natives!
Design for a Stained Glass Window Made of Flowers © Harold Davis
To reverse the pattern on a black background (below), I inverted the L-channel in LAB. As I’ll teach in my upcoming Flower Photography Intensive here in Berkeley and in Maine the first week of August, my technique is to then apply a curve adjustment to bring up the petals selectively. Next, I convert back to RGB, and selectively paste in the LAB three-channel inversion using the Exclusion blending mode.
Design for a Stained Glass Window Made of Flowers (on Black) © Harold Davis
May 30, 2017
Church and Lighthouse on Gozo
This is a view of a church and lighthouse on Gozo, an island that is part of the Maltese archipelago of three islands. We photographed the view in the morning light before everything was too harsh. Gozo is a beautiful and laid back place where I think one could spend a fair amount of dreamy time wandering the cliffs above the Mediterranean. For some reason, there are a large number of out-of-scale and out-of-the-way big, fairly modern churches—like the one shown—in many places on Gozo.
Church and Lighthouse, Gozo © Harold Davis
I’m caught up in the rush of being home in California, photographing flowers, organizing future workshop and travel plans, and being with family. But I’m trying to go through my images from the past several months travel in Vietnam, France, Spain, and—yes!—Malta, and gradually process some of these images.
Special thanks to Paul, we could not have wished for a better photographic guide to Gozo. Gozo, the mythological Ogygia, home to Calypso in the Odyssey, is a place I really, really hope to visit again.
May 28, 2017
Internship position available
We are looking for a hands-on intern with a serious interest in art and photography. The position will pay a modest stipend and/or garner academic credit (to be arranged depending on the individual situation). Please feel free to pass this post on if you know someone you think would be right!
Here’s are some more details:
Harold Davis Art & Photography, located in Berkeley, California, is the business arm representing Harold Davis, an internationally recognized artist and photographer whose work is exhibited, collected, and licensed widely. Harold Davis is an experienced and widely sought-after workshop leader, and the author of many books related to art and photography from publishers including Random House, Monacelli Press, and Focal Press. Our website is www.digitalfieldguide.com.
We seek an intern who is a self-starter, reliable, organized, and interested in hands-on art and photography. Primary duties will include assisting with printmaking, handmade artist book collation, work on studio design projects, and general studio duties. We are looking for an intern who can commit to ten hours per week. We are hoping that this internship will also qualify for academic credit, and to that end will supervise the interface between a creative project of the intern and real world implementation of said project.
Applicants should make contact by email with a resume, cover letter, brief statement of what they hope to get out of the internship, and (if available) a link to an online portfolio.
Bouquet of Neighborhood Flowers © Harold Davis
May 27, 2017
The Amazing World of Flowers
One of the things I love most about flower photography is that it compels one to look closely at flowers. The more you look, the more you see! What a wild world of beauty and diversity, with shapes, colors, forms that rival the world at large in light, rhythm, variety, harmony, and tumult.
Flower Petals © Harold Davis
Related story: Recent Flower Photos.
Rose Central © Harold Davis
May 25, 2017
Recent Flower Photos
I’m happy to take advantage of the wonderful spring flowers this year here in California, and make up for the time I was traveling with some extensive flower photography! Here are some flower images from the past few days, with more to come. Yay! I love flower photography.
Please keep in mind two upcoming flower photography workshops I will be giving: In Berkeley, CA Thursday June 22 – Sunday June 25 and in Rockport, Maine Sunday July 31 – Saturday August 5. Click here for my upcoming Workshops & Events calendar.
With a couple of these images (like the flower globes immediately below) to get the idea you really need to click the image to view it larger!
Great Balls of Flowers © Harold Davis
Dark Star © Harold Davis
Flower Power (via iPhone capture) © Harold Davis
Matilija Poppies – Variation I © Harold Davis
Matilija Poppies – Variation II © Harold Davis
Tower of Flowers © Harold Davis
May Flowers on Black © Harold Davis
Flowers for Luis (via iPhone capture) © Harold Davis
May 23, 2017
Fulsome Praise for The Photographer’s Black & White Handbook
I am blushing! From the Seattle Book Review: “Harold Davis is the digital black and white equal of Ansel Adams’s traditional wet photography. Adams would be awed by Davis’s work. In The Photographer’s Black and White Handbook Davis presents a large number of his photographs, and virtually every one is a masterpiece, ready for gallery or museum exhibit. In spite of the coffee-table quality of this volume, Davis meant to give us a teaching tool, a handbook for serious digital photographers.” Click here to read the full review.
