Harold Davis's Blog, page 123

Saint-Sulpice at Dusk

This is an image I made earlier this year outside the wonderful Saint-Sulpice in Paris as day faded to night (see this earlier story, also this one, and also this one for the inside of Saint-Sulpice). I used my 16mm Nikkor rectolinear fisheye lens, with the camera on tripod.

Saint-Sulpice at Dusk © Harold Davis

I am headed to Italy in the coming week, and hope to be blogging about my adventures in photography while I am there—unless I am having so much fun, and taking so many photos, that I don’t get the chance! In which possible case, TTFN.

Visit the southwest of France with a small group of compatible photographers

Explore the romantic Bordeaux wine region of France with master photographer Harold Davis. Stop at tiny medieval villages to photograph ancient buildings and visit one of the world’s centers of viticulture at Saint Emilion. Enjoy the fine wines and fabulous cuisine of southwestern France as you travel with Harold Davis on this nine day photo adventure (April 22-30, 2017)! Photograph the wonders of Bordeaux, Perigord, and the Dordogne with Harold as your photographic guide along the way.

If you’ve ever wanted to visit the southwest of France with a small group of compatible photographers, then this is the time! To find out more about this photographic adventure, click here. There is very limited space availability. To reserve one of the last remaining spots, please send us an email right away, and click here for the Trip Reservation Form. Please let us know if you have any questions!

Bend in the River – Dordogne © Harold Davis

Click here for Harold’s calendar of Workshops & Events.

Window on the Ancient Abbey © Harold Davis

Upcoming Harold Davis Workshops

I’m taking a break from leading workshops, teaching, writing books, and making prints in October to recharge my batteries, and to photograph in some very special Italian locations in conjunction with some of my European photography students who have become friends over the years. One of the purposes of my trip is to scout locations in the Dolomites and the lake district of Lombardy that might become a future base for workshops. I’ll also be photographing in Tuscany, and in Rome.

Clematis on Black © Harold Davis

Please consider signing up for one of my post-October workshops now, as places do go quickly. I pride myself on giving individual attention to each participant, and many of my workshops provide unique information that cannot be learned anywhere else—in some cases because I am the inventor of the workflows, processes, and techniques involved.

Nautilus © Harold Davis

You’ll find my calendar for the remainder of 2016 and the first half of 2017 below. First let me tell you a little more about some of these workshop opportunities!

We are very excited about two of our workshops scheduled for November, 2016. The first is Advanced LAB Color Seminar on Saturday November 12, intended for those with some Photoshop already under their belt who want to learn about the stunning creative possibilities inherent in LAB, the weirdest color space. There is no one else who teaches this material, and it is incredibly powerful!

Black & White in San Francisco, the weekend of November 19-20, is one part field photography, and one part classroom instruction in creative black and white post-production. I’ll be demonstrating some of the techniques explained and developed for my new book, The Photographer’s Black & White Handbook: Making and Processing Stunning Digital Black and White Photos from Monacelli Press.

Planet of the Succulents © Harold Davis

December, 2016 brings a Photographing Waves Workshop on Point Reyes under the auspices of Point Reyes Field Seminars. It is my seventh consecutive year leading this interesting workshop that teaches how to use shutter speed in the classroom and field in conjunction with the motion of the great Pacific waves themselves.

I’ll also be leading a session of Photographing Flowers for Transparency here in Berkeley in December. While this session is fully enrolled, if you are interested, the March 2017 session of Photographing Flowers for Transparency is just starting to fill up, and there are still ample places.

 

 

Tulip Pano © Harold Davis

If flower photography interests you, please keep in mind the Photographing Flowers Masterclass scheduled for June, 2017. Note that admission is by portfolio review, and that attendance at a session of Photographing Flowers for Transparency (or comparable experience and skill) is a perquisite.

Finally, please note that the early-bird discount for the January session of From iPhone to Art ends shortly, at the end of this month.

San Francisco Moonrise © Harold Davis

2016

Advanced LAB Color Seminar—Saturday, November 12, 2016; click here for details and registration.
Black & White in San Francisco: A Weekend Workshop with Harold Davis—November 19-20, 2016, click here for registration and information.
Photographing Flowers for Transparency, Weekend Workshop in Berkeley, CA, December 3-4, 2016; click here for details and registration (workshop full).
Photographing Waves on Point Reyes, Saturday December 10, full-day workshop under the auspices of Point Reyes Field Seminars. Click here for registration and information.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016—Free webinar with Harold Davis, sponsored by Topaz Labs, more information and registration link to come.

Garden Party Black © Harold Davis

2017

From iPhone to Art: Weekend iPhoneography Workshop—click here for details and registration, January 28-29, 2017 (early-bird discount ends September 20, 2016).
Photographing Flowers for Transparency, Weekend Workshop in Berkeley, CA, March 25-26, 2017; click here for details and registration.
Explore Bordeaux, Perigord, and the Dordogne with Harold Davis—Small group Destination Photography Workshop to Romantic Aquitaine. April 22-30, 2017. This an exclusive, very small photography tour with only a few places left. Click here for information and reservation form.
Malta: May 6-7, 2017—Weekend workshop sponsored by the Malta Photographic Society.
Flower Photography Intensive: 4-Day Masterclass in Flower Photography—click here for details and registration, 4-day workshop in Berkeley, CA., June 22-25, 2017.
October, 2017: Small group destination photo workshop with destination TBD; details to come; please send us an email to be added to the interest list.

Cordes sur Ciel at Dawn © Harold Davis

Snake Oil

Sitting in one of the many doctor’s consultation rooms I’ve visited with Phyllis in the past year, I noticed a large vitrine displaying antique medicine bottles. Since my iPhone is the camera I always have with me, I asked the good doctor for permission to photograph his collection. To learn more about photographing and processing images on your iPhone, please consider my iPhone to Art Weekend Workshop in January 2017 (early-bird discount applies through the end of the month).

Medicine Bottles © Harold Davis

The Nietzschian School of Gardening

Eons ago, when we first moved to California, we bought our house. Built in 1924, we bought it from the sixty-something kids of the original owners, the mom having recently passed away. Maintenance and yard work had been neglected for decades. This gave me the opportunity to start fresh with the garden.

Bougainvillea Stem © Harold Davis

After fencing the front yard, which was being used as a neighborhood dog dump, I went down to the local big box home improvement store. The garden section practiced what I think of as the Nietzschian School of Gardening—after the somewhat repugnant German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

In the case of the somewhat shriveled and definitely neglected bougainvillea vine I bought at Home Depot, Nietzsche definitely had a point. I’ve neglected it in the twenty years since I planted it at the southwest corner of our house, and our only concern has been to prune it back when it threatens to overrun the entire neighborhood.

To make this image, I clipped a stem from the bougainvillea, brought it inside to photograph it on my light box, and converted the result to LAB color for manipulations, finally converting the image back to RGB to create the master file.

Related image: Bougainvillea Variations.

New Multiple Exposures with Katje

I have some new images in my Multple Exposures series, photographed in collaboration with the beautiful and intelligent model Katje Gee.

About Face © Harold Davis

Manifestation © Harold Davis

Fedora © Harold Davis

I Am That Insect © Harold Davis

From iPhone to Art Weekend Workshop—Early Registration Discount Ends Soon

The early-bird registration discount for our weekend workshop From iPhone to Art: The Art of IPhoneography ends soon (on September 30, 2016). We still have some space left in this workshop. If you were considering registering, why not take advantage of this discount, and avoid the risk of being closed out. Full workshop details follow. Registration: Click here for registration.

From iPhone to ART: The Art of iPhoneography

A Two-Day Weekend Workshop with Harold Davis, Saturday January 28 – Sunday January 29, 2017

Tuition: $645 until September 30, 2016 (early-bird special); $695 thereafter.

Registration: Click here for registration. Once on the Meetup website, RSVP YES, and pay the tuition via Paypal (using a credit card). Alternatively, send us an email that you’d like to register, and either mail us a check for the tuition amount, or we can email you a Paypal invoice for the tuition that can be paid via credit card. Note that Meetup attendance count may not reflect actual workshop enrollment. 

The iPhone is the most used camera in the world. As they say, the best camera to use is the one you have with you, and this is often your iPhone camera. Harold says, “While I haven’t given up my ‘big-boy cameras’ by any stretch, my iPhone camera and its apps have opened a whole new world of experimentation and creativity. Bravo being a photographic kid again!”

Note: The images in this workshop listing were all photographed and processed on Harold’s iPhone! Learn how to unleash the creative potential of your iPhone camera and apps.

But the fundamental rules of photography still apply, and you can become a powerful photographer with your iPhone by learning the fundamentals of exposure and composition.

Of course, your iPhone is more than just a camera. The computing power within a contemporary iPhone is greater than the computing power that sent NASA to the moon—and many photography apps take advantage of this “darkroom” in your pocket.

In From iPhone to Art, we will learn how to leverage our talents to make the best iPhone imagery we can. Demos, lectures, and hands-on exercises will explore the principles of photography as they relate to the iPhone camera.

Tender Dance © Harold Davis

Since the iPhone is the camera we always have with us, and since so much of our photography is done with the iPhone, why not be the best iPhoneographers we can be?

Master photographer and Photoshop guru par-excellence will show you some of the apps he uses to finish his iPhone images. Advanced topics will include texturizing and layering iPhone images.

The workshop will include several guided field sessions, in class processing help, and image critiques. Those who have attended Harold’s previous iPhone workshop are encouraged to attend; newcomers are also welcome. Class materials provided includes a list of suggested apps.

Registration: Click here for registration

What Participants Have Said about Harold’s Previous iPhone Workshops

“Great information! I learned lots of new tricks and different ways of seeing things. Thank you so much.”—FW
“I enjoyed the class and am having fun practicing with the new apps. Thanks!”—LT
“Hey guys, thanks for a great workshop!”—MP
“I’ve had fun with my iPhone before, but I thought it was kind of a toy. I never knew one could make serious prints from iPhone images, and I had a great deal of fun with the creative apps. Great group of people, too!”—SA
“One day was great, but I’m on information overload. Can you please do a two-day workshop? I’ll sign up right away. This was so cool.”—FA

About Harold Davis

Harold Davis is an internationally-known digital artist and award-winning professional photographer. He is the author of many bestselling photography books including The Way of the Digital Photographer (Peachpit Press, awarded as a Top 10 Best 2013 Photography Book of the Year by Photo.net). Harold Davis’s most recent book is Achieving Your Potential As a Photographer: A Photographer’s Creative Companion and Workbook (Focal Press). His Photographing Flowers (Focal Press) is a noted photography “classic,” and is rated the Best Guide to Flower Photography byDigital Photographer Magazine.

Giverny © Harold Davis

In addition to his activity as a bestselling book author, Harold Davis is an Adobe Influencer, a Moab Master printmaker and a Zeiss Lens Ambassador. Harold Davis’s work is in collections around the world. It is licensed by art publishers, in annual reports, and has appeared in numerous magazines and many publications.

Harold’s black and white prints have been described as “hauntingly beautiful” by Fine Art Printer Magazine, and his floral prints have been called “ethereal,” with “a purity and translucence that borders on spiritual” by Popular Photography.

Recently Harold Davis’s work has been exhibited in venues including Photokina in Cologne, Germany, PhotoPlus Expo in New York, the Gallery Photo in Oakland, California, the Arts & Friends Gallery in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Awagami Gallery in Japan.

Harold Davis has led destination photography workshops to many locations including Paris, France; Spain and Morocco; and the ancient Bristlecone Pines of the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains in California.

Harold’s popular online course on Craftsy.com, Photographing Flowers, has thousands of students. His ongoing photography workshops in partnership with institutions such as Point Reyes Field Seminars, the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, Maine Media Workshops, and the Heidelberg Summer School of Photography are continually in demand and popular.

According to Rangefinder Magazine, Harold Davis is “a man of astonishing eclectic skills and accomplishments.” You can learn more about Harold and his work at his website, www.digitalfieldguide.com and on his blog, http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/blog/.

Registration: Click here for registration

Autumn Bouquet

Dahlias are not an autumn flower, although they come towards the end of summer riotous display of floral colorification. It’s actually the autumnal hues of these particular Dahlias that makes me call this an “Autumn Bouquet.”

Autumn Bouquet © Harold Davis

It was great fun to photograph it on my light box, process it for translucency to a white background, and add it in Photoshop to a scanned paper background.

Related story and some images: Persistence of Personal Vision.

Planet of the Succulents

Planet of the Succulents © Harold Davis

This is a succulent from our front porch. I brought it inside, and photographed it straight down on a black velvet background. My thought was that it looked rounded like a globe or planet. I used my 55mm f/1.4 Zeiss Otus lens at 1/6 of a second and f/16 at ISO 64 with the camera on a tripod. I cropped to create a square image in post-production. The version below is an L-channel inversion of the original image, using LAB color.

Evil Twin: Inverted Succulent World © Harold Davis

Last few days to enroll for Get Your Camera Off Auto; November Workshops

I’ll be leading a session of Get Your Camera Off Auto here in Berkeley, California this Saturday—so there are only a few days left to enroll. This is the perfect workshop if you are new to photography and want to get the concepts and controls on your camera right in the first place, or if you are a more experienced photographer wanting a refresher in the core creative photographic ideas. The session is currently a little light on enrollment—which is good for you to get the maximum individual attention. I do not plan to schedule another session of Get Your Camera Off Auto until the autumn of next year at the earliest.

Please also note two workshops scheduled for November: Advanced LAB Color Seminar on Saturday November 12, intended for those with some Photoshop already under their belt who want to learn about the stunning creative possibilities inherent in LAB, the weirdest color space; and Black & White in San Francisco, the weekend of November 19-20.

Black & White in San Francisco is one part field photography, and one part classroom instruction in creative black and white post-production. I’ll be demonstrating some of the techniques explained and developed for my new book, The Photographer’s Black & White Handbook: Making and Processing Stunning Digital Black and White Photos from Monacelli Press.

Also note my free webinar coming up on Tuesday September 20 sponsored by Topaz Labs, A Touch of Art with Harold Davis and Topaz.

Full Day Workshop: Get Your Camera Off Automatic with Harold Davis

Have you always wanted to take fantastic photos, but somehow they never seem to come out as well as you see them in your mind’s eye?

By leaving their camera in one of the programmed automatic modes many photographers fail to realize their full creative potential. At the same time, if you don’t shoot manually you won’t learn the basic concepts of photography. In this intensive one-day workshop you will learn all you need to know to successfully support your creative vision by using your camera to its full potential.

Cordes-sur-Ciel at Sunrise © Harold Davis

Besides presentations from award-winning master photographer Harold Davis, this workshop uses hands-on exercises to “cement-in” the concepts you will learn.

Where: MIG Meeting Place, 800 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94710

When: September 17, 2016, 9:45AM

Tuition: $99 per person.

What to bring: Your camera, camera manual, tripod (if you have one), and a sense of fun and wonder!

Registration: Click here for information and registration on Meetup!

So please bring your camera, camera manual, and tripod (if you have one).

Upper White River Falls © Harold Davis

Who is this workshop for?

If you’ve been enjoying shooting digital photos, but don’t really understand the underlying photographic concepts or what the camera settings do this workshop is a fun way to get quickly up to speed.

Perhaps you are used to shooting film and want to get up to speed on the concepts of digital photography. Then this intensive “Digital Photography 101” workshop may be for you.

Intermediate digital photographers may also be interested in this workshop as an easy way to help them reinforce and remember what they’ve previously learned.

Registration: Click here for information and registration on Meetup!

Manarola © Harold Davis

Curriculum

9:45AM – Workshop orientation

10:00 – Fundamental concepts: Exposure, the exposure triangle, aperture, f-stops, shutter speed, sensitivity (ISO), sensor size, focal length, focus

11:00 – Setting your camera using the basic concepts

11:30 – Camera Clinic – first session

12:00 – Hands-on exercises

1:00 – Lunch break

1:45PM – Exercise review and concept refresher

2:30 – From camera to computer and digital post-production

3:30 – Hands-on exercises

4:30 – Review, wrap-up, and Q&A

5:30 – Camera Clinic – second session

Registration: Click here for information and registration on Meetup!

Rooftops of Paris © Harold Davis

What past participants have said about this workshop:

“It was a great day filled with both opportunities to practice and many words of wisdom from Harold.”

“This was a most informative and interesting workshop. It covered the things I wanted to learn about, and I left satisfied. I recommend it to anyone who wants a good basic class.”

“Great workshop! Learned a lot! Also appreciate the effort that went into putting the class together – the small conveniences like water, snack, handouts, and a nice meeting space made it easier to get through the day without being overwhelmed. Highly recommended.”

Registration: Click here for information and registration on Meetup!

In a Blue Hour © Harold Davis

 

Registration: Click here for information and registration on Meetup!

When Flowers Talk © Harold Davis