Harold Davis's Blog, page 208

Story of o

I walked along the trail beside San Francisco Bay near Richmond, California. My idea was to capture sunset on the mudflats of the Bay at low tide. When I traversed down to the water, instead of mud I saw an old girder sticking out of the Bay. A generation ago, this place had been a land fill and dump—and it still could sure use some clean-up.

Story of O © Harold Davis

Together with its reflection, the girder made a perfect circle, or letter ‘O’. I shot the image using a long exposure (60 seconds) to create the smooth, gradient background from the gentle action of the wavelets on the Bay in the setting sun.

Sunset from Sutro Baths

Sunset was spectacular here in the San Francisco Bay area yesterday. I shot west out to the Pacific Ocean from Sutro Baths, shown here with a long enough exposure (15 seconds) to calm the action of the waves.

Sutro Sunset © Harold Davis

Assembling Botanique

I am very excited that Botanique is finally becoming real. Botanique is my limited edition, handmade book of floral prints, partially funded by Kickstarter (thanks Kickstarter sponsors so much!). The iPhone photo below shows some of the first pages just off the printer. The translucent cover wrapper, printed on archival vellum is shown, along with two of the Unryu washi pull-outs that are in Botanique.

Prototyping Botanique

Botanique is a limited edition, handcrafted book of original botanical prints by legendary photographer and master printer Harold Davis. According to Popular Photo Magazine, “Harold Davis’ ethereal floral arrangements have a purity and translucence that borders on spiritual.”

Botanique is strictly limited to an edition of twenty-five copies, plus five artist proof copies. Each book is hand-signed and numbered by the artist, and presented in an archival box suitable for display.

Botanique has been hand printed on an Epson 9900 StylusPro printer using archival Ultrachrome inks. Within the book there are twenty-one prints on archival substrates including archival vellum, Moenkopi Unryu Washi, Moenkopi Kozo Washi, Moab Slickrock pearlized metallic,and Colorado Fibergloss photographic paper. Each book is hand-cut, and hand-assembled in the artist’s studio. Bonus features include three foldout prints in over-sized panoramic format.

Each copy of Botanique ships with a signed 9″ X 12″ print of Harold Davis’ popular Red Poppies image, suitable for framing.

Botanique—Tools of the trade

The first tier of five copies of Botanique has sold out at $500 each, we are now taking orders for numbers 6-10 at $750 each. Considering the number of prints in Botanique and how handsome the volume looks overall this is actually a great deal. Please contact the studio if you would like more information or to reserve a copy.

I’ll be posting more details and photos of an actual copy of Botanique in the next couple of days!

 

Stanford Memorial Church

This is an HDR fisheye shot looking up at the ceiling of the Stanford Memorial Church and its rather wonderful mosaics.

Stanford Memorial Church © Harold Davis

Star Magnolia

This Magnolia stellata was clipped from a flowering hedge in my neighborhood that borders a major avenue and photographed for maximum translucency. It makes a great print on Kozo washi (rice paper).

Star Magnolia © Harold Davis

We are busy prototyping our handmade limited edition book of floral images, Botanique, and a reproduction of Star Magnolia on Kozo will be included.

Ice-Nine

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle ice-nine is a crystal with the power to freeze all life on earth, perhaps as I did with these yellow roses. Not really! Nor were they shot through a wet shower door.

The roses were shot on a white background, and then I applied one of my images of waterdrops on windows (Window Study #3) as a texture overlay.

Ice-Nine © Harold Davis

Other examples of texture overlays: Everything in moderation, Like a Titian, Venice of Cuba.

Not a pretty face

Not far as the crow flies from the glamorous and scenic parts of San Francisco lies a moldering waterfront south along San Francisco Bay. The structures look like they belong more to Detroit and the Rust belt than they do to San Francisco.

Abandoned Industrial Building, India Basin, San Francisco © Harold Davis

An occasional luxury condo building appears within the zone of shoreline decay. China Basin, India Basin, Hunts Point—you can feel these areas holding their collective breath just waiting for the infusion of massive renovation funds. In the meantime, the everyday affairs of the dislocated and the 99% continue. As evidence, the sign shown in my iPhone photo prohibits living (“habitation”) in one’s vehicle during the hours of the night (10PM – 6AM) “Everyday” [sic].

Shot with my iPhone 4 camera app using HDR, and processing using the Plastic Bullet app.

Lombard Street at night

The idea of this night shot along the famous curves of Lombard Street in San Francisco was to use my shutter speed setting creatively to get the desired effect with the car trails. So the process was to first determine the duration that was about right for the tail lights of a car slowly moving down the curve to fill the frame horizontally.

Of course, there are going to be variations depending on the speed of the car, but the best effects were achieved using a shutter speed duration  in the 8-15 seconds range. With the shutter speed in place, it was easy to calculate the other two components of the exposure equation (aperture and ISO).

Lombard Street at Night © Harold Davis

The exposure information for this frame was 12mm, 15 seconds at f/11 and ISO 200, tripod mounted. The exposure works in part because of the ambient light of the background scene, which is bright enough so you can see Coit Tower and the Bay Bridge in the background (as well as nearby houses), but not so bright that it is blown out at the settings that work for the cars.

I shot the image just before Christmas while hanging out with a friend and listening to Christmas carols sung by inebriated cable car passengers going by on Hyde Street.

Tennessee Beach Landslide

For many years one of the pleasures of the two-mile hike down to Tennessee Beach in the Marin Headlands has been to view the wonderful hole in the cliff on the north side of the beach. This dramatic formation as it appeared in 2007 can be seen in the photo below, which is lit by moonlight. A star appears through the hole in the cliff in the photo.

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Tennessee Beach in 2007 (original title “Power of the Moon”) © Harold Davis

Sometime during the tumultuous storms of the last few weeks this cliff collapsed, presumably brought down by rain and wind. The impact on the appearance of the north end of Tennessee Beach is tremendous and visceral, as you can see in the 2013 view of the scene below that I shot yesterday.

Tennessee Beach in 2013 (facing north) © Harold Davis

Looking at the fault line exposed by the landslide, it seems likely that erosion will continue. Perhaps the cliff jutting out into the sea is doomed to become an island sea stack in the course of time. But I am no geologist.

The cliffs looking north from Tennessee Beach are still spectacular, although I miss the unique formation of the hole in the cliff.

This slide in a beloved landscape is a reminder that nothing lasts forever, and that the only constant is change. Confronted with clear evidence that even something as apparently immutable as the iron-bound cliffs of the Marin Headlands are not static we have to conclude that our lives will change as well—in ways that are hard to expect or predict, and out of our control.

Change can be disconcerting, particularly when it is precipitated by exogenous events—the human equivalents to landslide. The way to survive in style is to eschew denial, and accept that the unpredictable is by definition unpredictable.

Art is where you find it

Art is where you find it. I found this light phenomenon—caused by the reflections off two parked cars—when I came out from a Costco shopping adventure with the kids. Shot with my iPhone camera, I think the effect looks something like an illuminated land jelly fish. Where have you unexpectedly seen interesting images lately?

Parking lot light phenomenon © Harold Davis