Harold Davis's Blog, page 145

Courtyard in Naples

Glancing through the huge double-doors, I saw this courtyard in old Naples. Boldly I stepped through the doors, and iPhone held high like any tourist made this image, which I processed on my iPhone using the Waterlogue app.

Courtyard in Naples © Harold Davis

Antipasto

I had this mixed antipasto at Campagnola, a classic Neapolitan trattoria in the heart of old Naples. The dish was incredibly delicious. Words simply cannot describe the sensuous lusciousness of food like this.

Antipasto © Harold Davis

Coming into Naples

Coming into Naples, an incredible snarl of traffic. This is take-no-prisoners driving, and really kind of fun to watch in a madcap way. Particularly since it wasn’t me driving.

Bay of Naples © Harold Davis

We were met at the train station by Fabio, our unflappable driver, and Lavinia, our wonderful guide. They drove us to the heights above Naples to photograph the great Bay of Naples as the sun was setting (you can see Vesuvius the volcano in the photo).

Naples is a fascinating, noisy, incredible, and underrated city. It is the most densely populated city in Europe. There are some wild and wonderful things to photograph near our hotel, which is located in the heart of the old city. I am glad to be getting to know Naples a bit, but think it would take much time to really understand this city.

Orange Juice on the Cinque Terre Trail

Yesterday I slept in, which felt great after the jet lag from the nine hours difference in time with California. After the intensive orientation to Cinque Terre of the day before with a great professional guide, my group was on their own, happily pursuing individual agendas and itineraries. In the mid-morning, I started on the Cinque Terre Trail from Monterosso-al-Mare on the Ligurian Coast of Italy. My destination was Vernazza, the next town south along the coast in the “Five Lands” (Cinque Terre).

Orange juice on the Cinque Terre Trail © Harold Davis

Considering how many people hike this trail, it was surprisingly rugged, with a great many ups and downs to traverse the steep headlands. At about the half way point I came upon the gentleman shown above. He’d run a power cable from above in the vineyards, and was squeezing fresh orange juice at two Euros the glass (about $2.20). A very refreshing break along the trail!

Lunch in Vernazza © Harold Davis

When I got to Vernazza I had a yummy seafood salad lunch in an elegant restaurant on the piazza by the harbor, then stayed to photograph the picturesque town itself. All images made with my iPhone 6s.

Vernazza © Harold Davis

Leaning Tower

On our way from Florence to Cinque Terre on the Ligurian Coast of Italy, we stopped to climb the Leaning Tower—Torre Pendente in Italian—of Pisa. It’s a marvelous structure, even if it does “lean in” (as they say these days)! But experientially, the visit has some disorienting aspects across several domains.

Leaning Tower © Harold Davis

First, there’s the physical disorientation of climbing a spiral stair that is on an angle, and passing windows that are successively just a little bit sideways. By the way, I saw a woman climb these stairs in the highest of heels, quite a feat! But I digress.

Something about this disorientation leads to a popular phenomenon: the “selfie” with the Leaning Tower that uses perspective to distort the scale of things. In these selfies, the perpetrator is either “pushing” the tower over, or “propping” it up with gigantic figures out of proportion compared to the tower.

There always seems to be a crowd at the Leaning Tower’s piazza: sellers of plastic models, police, tourists, crowds. Gated admission is by advance ticket sales in groups every 15 minutes, with security pat-downs. This is not a quiet place, in fact it is a bit overwhelming. Security is very tight, no bags of any sort are allowed up the tower (don’t even dream of taking your tripod!).

So this is the other facet of disorientation: modern life seems to intrude in an objectionable way in a place that is visited because of a structure that didn’t perform to specifications and is almost a thousand years old. Go figure!

When all is said and done, if you get the chance, don’t miss climbing the tower.  It’s worth the disorientation and logistical hassles.

Harold in Italy

How amazing it is to leave California in the afternoon, transit through an airline haze of mediocre movies and reading materials, and more-or-less the next morning to arrive in Italy!

Ponte Vechio Night Reflections © Harold Davis

Here in Florence I have enjoyed photographing the Ponte Vechio and the Duomo. In a little I meet my group, and the adventure continues!

Off to Italy Monday; Early Registration Discount for Paris in the Spring Ends Soon

Italy: I am totally, totally excited to be off to Italy on Monday to lead a destination photo workshop. Phyllis and I have been planning this trip for over a year! I’m totally psyched to see it actually happening, and very excited about the locations, hotels, restaurants, and new and old friends who will be with me. Can’t wait to get out my camera on Italian soil! I’ve been charged by a friend to photograph some of the meals we’ll be eating, so that also is (so to speak) on my plate. You can click here to see exactly where we will be going! (PDF download)

Paris: My photography group the first week of May 2016 in Paris is starting to come together. So if this destination photo workshop interests you, to take advantage of the early-registration discount, please drop us an email. You can click here for the detailed itinerary, and here for the Reservation form. Please let us know if you have any questions!

Last but not least: In the planning stages: a week in a Tuscany in an historic rural farmhouse near Sienna, Italy in October, 2016 with a small group; and a follow-on week in Venice in the October-November 2016 time-frame. If either (or both!) of these seem intriguing, drop us a line to be added to the interest lists.

And save the date: My last webinar with Topaz Labs was so much fun, and so popular, that I’ll be doing it again: on Tuesday, January 12, 2016 at 2PM. This one is Beyond Photography: Painterly Effects with Topaz, and I am looking forward to going completely wild! The webinar is free, but pre-registration is required—stay tuned for the registration link, which is yet to come.

Speaking of staying tuned: Please consider bookmarking my Workshops & Events page. My contact info is here, and you can subscribe to my email list or my blog by email here.

The Kingdom of Magic Shall Prevail © Harold Davis

Off to Italy Monday; Early Registration Discount for Paris in the Spring

Italy: I am totally, totally excited to be off to Italy on Monday to lead a destination photo workshop. Phyllis and I have been planning this trip for over a year! I’m totally psyched to see it actually happening, and very excited about the locations, hotels, restaurants, and new and old friends who will be with me. Can’t wait to get out my camera on Italian soil! I’ve been charged by a friend to photograph some of the meals we’ll be eating, so that also is (so to speak) on my plate. You can click here to see exactly where we will be going! (PDF download)

Paris: My photography group the first week of May 2016 in Paris is starting to come together. So if this destination photo workshop interests you, to take advantage of the early-registration discount, please drop us an email. You can click here for the detailed itinerary, and here for the Reservation form. Please let us know if you have any questions!

Last but not least: In the planning stages: a week in a Tuscany in an historic rural farmhouse near Sienna, Italy in October, 2016 with a small group; and a follow-on week in Venice in the October-November 2016 time-frame. If either (or both!) of these seem intriguing, drop us a line to be added to the interest lists.

And save the date: My last webinar with Topaz Labs was so much fun, and so popular, that I’ll be doing it again: on Tuesday, January 12, 2016 at 2PM. This one is Beyond Photography: Painterly Effects with Topaz, and I am looking forward to going completely wild! The webinar is free, but pre-registration is required—stay tuned for the registration link, which is yet to come.

Speaking of staying tuned: Please consider bookmarking my Workshops & Events page. My contact info is here, and you can subscribe to my email list or my blog by email here.

The Kingdom of Magic Shall Prevail © Harold Davis

Presentation Matters: Why Book Publishers Should Care About Quality

Roger Horton is the CEO of Taylor & Francis (T&F), one of the world’s largest publishers of academic and professional titles. T&F is one of the companies in the Informa Group, a multi-national player with 6,500 employees world-wide and multi-billion dollar revenues. Here’s part of the Informa mission statement:

We operate in the Knowledge & Information Economy, delivering products and services to commercial and academic customers through an array of media, from digital to print to face-to-face. Through this engagement, we share knowledge, insight and intelligence in specialty topics, and we provide connectivity to expert communities.

T&F has bulked up via acquisitions over the years, with Routledge a major acquisition in 1998, and CRC Press acquired in 2003. More recently, Focal Press, one of my publishers, was acquired. Focal has a very long and distinguished history of publishing photography books since the 1930s, but now has essentially been gutted, with the imprint recast as a division of Routledge.

Getting back to Mr. Horton (as you’ll recall, he is the CEO of the conglomerate that swallowed Focal Press, one of my publishers), in a financial presentation to shareholders, he has stated that “content quality is king: print, e-books, online are merely the delivery tools.”

In other words, content divorced from its presentation is now seen as the key to the publishing kingdom. This content can be sliced, diced, and resold at a profit without having to worry about the high production or inventory cost of decently produced physical books (or the production costs of well-produced e-Books, for that matter).

I don’t want to pick on Mr. Horton too much. It’s hard to argue with the proposition that great content is, well, great. And T&F and Informa are hardly alone among big publishers in wanting to have friction-less profits based on content by itself, without having to worry about the headaches that come from producing and inventorying physical goods. To paraphrase the author Erica Jong, whose first book used the idea in a very different context, this is the dream of “zipless” publishing where virtual stuff—the ideas of experts and academics—becomes spun into monetary value for company shareholders in our physical world.

My new book, Achieving Your Potential As a Photographer: A Photographer’s Creative Companion and Workbook, was published just before Focal Press was gutted by T&F. I am very proud of the content, photographs, design, and production that went into my book. It is the last book that I will be publishing with T&F—despite a multi-book contract with Focal—because the reconstituted company simply doesn’t have a commitment to quality trade book production. My understanding is that the reason T&F has canceled my contracts is because they don’t want to live up to the quality book production standards I had written into the contracts before I signed them in 2014.

In Achieving Your Potential As a Photographer, I strongly urge readers to draw their own creative line in the sand to become the best artists that they can be.

I am the author and producer of 18 bestselling photography books that my wife, Phyllis Davis, has designed. So this is one place as an artist, photographer, and writer that I am drawing my own line in the sand. When it comes to photography books, the quality of the design, reproduction, and book production does matter—a great deal!!!

In fact, generally quality of design is a huge factor in this world, whether one is dealing in old fashioned domains or in high technology. Regarding technology, Steve Jobs’s Apple is a great case in point, showing how quality design and quality physical production add tremendous value to what would otherwise be fairly generic products.

I am committed to working as an artisan across the domains of content production. Whether I am creating books for trade publication, e-Books, fine-art prints, handmade books, or online learning tools, I will only do so with elegance, grace, and style. The timeless idea of quality can be appreciated and will be rewarded whether the mechanisms of production are the latest in high-tech printers, or as ancient as hand-made, one-off construction.

A publisher that willfully ignores the difficult issues of quality in production is definitely off-the-rails. They are looking at books and content in a very shortsighted way, and missing the forest for the trees. Yes, it does take time, money, and effort to get things right—but getting things right is always worth doing.

 

Photograph Paris in the Spring

If not now, when? What about the May 1 – May 7 2016 destination photography workshop, Photograph Paris with Harold Davis in the Springtime?

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? Click here for Itinerary and Reservation info.