Harold Davis's Blog, page 27
February 14, 2022
Flowers for Miss Havisham
Flowers for Miss Havisham (below) completes the quartet of four images begun with Earthly Delights, and continued with Aging in Place and Remembrance.
Flowers for Miss Havisham © Harold Davis
Remembrance © Harold Davis
Aging in Place © Harold Davis
Earthly Delights © Harold Davis
February 11, 2022
Remembrance
The flowers remember when they were young. The easy, sensuous unfurling of Earthly Delights is long past. With Aging in Place the grace of youth is gone, but joy and strength are in full bloom. Today’s image shows just as much beauty with the inner core of youth and resilience supplanted and tempered with wisdom—along with a tinge of melancholy, since all things must pass.
Remembrance © Harold Davis
February 9, 2022
Contemplating a return to the “new normal”
Here’s some of what we are working on (while contemplating a return to a “new normal”):
The eBook is now available with the soft launch of my new book Composition & Photography;QT Luong will be presenting his work on the less-known national monuments in an upcoming live benefit webinar;I will be taking a deep dive into my ideas about photographic composition in a new upcoming webinar to benefit Doctors without Borders;We have a few places left on our dream photographic adventure to southwest France at the end of April. Please contact us if you are interested.Click here for our complete Workshops & Events schedule. We are keeping an eye out for when my two postage stamps will be issued (sometime in 2022).
Petal Dancer © Harold Davis
February 7, 2022
Composition & Photography eBook now available; you can pre-order the print book directly from the publisher
My new book Composition & Photography:Working with Photography Using Design Concepts is now available for pre-order from the publisher’s website. The estimated publication date is May 31, 2022. The eBook is ready for download now. May I suggest the eBook and print book bundle, available at a nice discount to the unbundled price for each?
Speaking of a nice discount, please use the discount code COMP40 for a 40% discount at checkout (of course, this more than pays for the incremental cost of the bundle). This discount code only works on Rocky Nook’s website (the wonderful publisher of my new book).
My book has some unusual ideas from a wide range of dsiciplines, visual puzzles, and thought exercises, so please let me know what you think!
Interior Views of Flowers
For this week’s interior views of flowers, I used my macro probe lens placed inside the outer petals of the floral blossom. The upper image of a tulip is lit from behind by a light box. The lower image, inside a paperwhite, is lit with a ring light on the probe. For more interior flower images, check out Inside Lisianthus, the links within that story, and elsewhere in the flowers category on my blog.
Purple Tulip © Harold Davis
Paperwhite—Inside View © Harold Davis
February 6, 2022
Aging in Place
I left my arrangement of tulips, iris, and daffodils on its black velvet stage. Several days later, the bouquet had aged in place. It was still beautiful, but in a very different way than when it was younger.
Aging in Place © Harold Davis
February 4, 2022
Announcing new benefit webinar: Our National Monuments with QT Luong
What: Our National Monuments with QT Luong [Benefits Conservation Land Foundation and the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club]
When: Saturday March 26, 2022 at 11:00am PT. Duration between one and two hours, including Q&A
Where: On your computer or mobile device from anywhere via Zoom. This is a benefit webinar, with pre-registration required using your Zoom account. A tuition payment of $19.95 is required for enrollment. All proceeds benefit Conservation Lands Foundation and the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club. The registration link is https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ilCn8D-STCmB1bDWk6fM_g
QT Luong—one of the most prolific photographers working in America’s public lands and author of the best-selling and acclaimed photography book about the national parks, Treasured Lands—hiked and camped in the 22 land-based national monuments under review, aiming his lens at the grand vistas, archaeological wonders, and hidden delights along the way.
In this presentation, QT Luong will show images from Our National Monuments, tell some of the stories behind the images, and tell us about some of the lesser-known national monuments and what they can offer to adventurous landscape photographers. Harold Davis will interview and lead a discussion with QT Luong following his presentation.
The presentation will be followed by a Q&A.
Who should attend: Anyone interested in nature and landscape photography, those who like to “explore” lesser-known and hidden U.S. national monuments, and those who are interested in the preservation of wild lands.
Number of Seats, Tuition, and Benefit: The tuition for this webinar is $19.95 and requires prior registration. All proceeds benefit Conservation Lands Foundation and the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club, but the ticket price is not tax deductible. You must register via Zoom to be enrolled in this webinar! If you haven’t paid the tuition, you aren’t registered. Please contact us in advance with any questions.
The registration link is https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ilCn8D-STCmB1bDWk6fM_g
About QT Luong: QT Luong, a photographer, author, and environmentalist, was the first to photograph all 63 US National Parks – in large format. He received the National Parks Conservation Association’s Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks and was featured in the film The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.
His work has been profiled and critically acclaimed in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The San Jose Mercury News, among many other magazines, newspapers, and other media. His photographs are the subject of five books, including the best-selling Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey Through America’s National Parks (winner of twelve national and international book awards). They have appeared in hundreds of publications worldwide. Luong’s limited-edition prints are widely collected and have been exhibited solo in museums and galleries nationwide and abroad.
QT Luong lives in San Jose, California, with his wife and two children. To see more of his work, visit terragalleria.com.
February 2, 2022
Earthly Delights
My first love in art was color. It took me years to appreciate monochrome. As a (relatively and sometimes) mature artist, I understand that black and white lays open the bones of the composition, and I appreciate a good monochrome image as much (or more) than the next photographer.
Earthly Delights © Harold Davis
But as a young painter, I reveled in color. My affair with color began with the impressionists and post-impressionists, particularly Monet’s paintings of his garden at Giverny, Gauguin’s lush fantasies of the south seas islands and islanders, and of course Van Gogh. Soon, my horizons widened to infatuation with expressionists such as Emil Nolde, abstractionists such as Arshile Gorky, and color field painters, particularly Mark Rothko.
Life teaches us many things, not all of them lessons we wanted to learn. Color, I found out, is kind of a “cheap date.” Sure, color will entice and entrance you, but will it go the distance?
That said, when nature puts out its color finery, as in the bouquet I arranged for Earthly Delights, I am surely not above reveling in the simple and flamboyant pleasures of polychromatic imagery.
February 1, 2022
Creating Structure Using Forms and Patterns [Webinar Benefits Doctors without Borders]
What: Creating Structure Using Forms and Patterns with Harold Davis | Benefits Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières).
When:Saturday February 26, 2022 at 11:00am PT. Duration between one and two hours, including Q&A
Where: Live webinar on your computer or mobile device from anywhere via Zoom. This is a benefit webinar, with pre-registration required using your Zoom account. A tuition payment of $19.95 is required for enrollment. All proceeds benefit Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). The registration link is https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_f2rskyGUT7iSXSC3Gd272g
Details: Of all the magical elixirs that make up a successful photograph, composition is perhaps the most fundamental, and at the same time the most elusive. What makes a composition “good”? It’s hard to define exactly, but we instinctively recognize good composition when we see it. There is an undeniable emotional response when a composition resonates with and complements the subject matter of an image.
But traditional attempts to define “good composition” and to pass on rules for good compositional construction are often doomed to failure. The truth is, there are no hard and fast rules. Rules eliminate experimentation and spontaneity which are crucial for creating compelling, dynamic, and exciting compositions. The best compositions contain an element of the unexpected. “Expect the unexpected!” is perhaps the only viable “rule” of composition. To create exciting compositions, you must have a willingness to embrace serendipity and change as part of your artistic practice. After all, composition is a process, not a result.
Endless Doors © Harold Davis
In this webinar Harold approaches composition as an instance of open-ended two-dimensional design. Photographic examples and “thought experiments” will start with simple shapes, such as lines and circles, and proceed through patterns and repetitions, and onwards to spirals, fractals, and abstractions. The webinar will present ideas from Harold’s new book Composition & Photography, and will be intended to provoke thought about composition basics.
The goal of this webinar is to enable individual integration of the process of composition into each participant’s creative practice.
The presentation will be followed by a Q&A.
Who should attend: Anyone who wants to find out more about creating images that work and about the creative process of composition in photography.
Number of Seats, Tuition, and Benefit: The tuition for this webinar is $19.95 and requires prior registration. All proceeds benefit Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), but the ticket price is not tax deductible. You must register via Zoom to be enrolled in this webinar! If you haven’t paid the tuition, you aren’t registered. Please contact us in advance with any questions.
The registration link is https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_f2rskyGUT7iSXSC3Gd272g
About Harold Davis: Harold Davis is an internationally known photographer and a sought-after workshop leader. According to Popular Photography Magazine, “Harold Davis’s ethereal floral arrangements have a purity and translucence that borders on spiritual.” He is a Moab Master and a Zeiss Ambassador. He has exhibited widely and his prints are extensively collected. In 2022, several of his images were selected by the United States Post Office for use as postage stamps.
Rangefinder Magazine states that “Harold Davis is a force of nature—a man of astonishing eclectic skills and accomplishments.”
Harold Davis is a bestselling author of many books, including Composition & Photography, Creative Garden Photography and Creative Black and White, all from Rocky Nook.
Harold Davis’s website is digitalfieldguide.com.
January 29, 2022
Blast from the Past
We found one of my 1980s museum posters , “shipped with nice vintage glass and metal frame frame.” Can’t wait to see that vintage glass! (Not really.) Dare I say, “Cheap at the price?” You can read more about the image and my poster here.
New York, New York © Harold Davis
Related story: Halloween in the New York that Was.
