Harold Davis's Blog, page 53

Announcing New Online Live Webinars

I am proud to announce a series of NEW online Harold Davis webinars. At this point, we will be experimenting with different subjects and offerings. So if there is anything you’d particularly like me to teach online, please let me know. I’ll probably do it!

You can keep an eye on our Workshops & Events page and our Live Webinars page. We are planning a mixture of free and paid online events. Please check out our live webinar listings!

Be mighty. Stay healthy and sane. Keep creative, and make art. #allinthistogether #artinthistogether #CantQuarantineArt 

Photographing Flowers for Transparency | Part 1: Introduction Thursday April 9, 2020 at 10AM PT FREE, click here for advance registration (required). Seats are limited. 


Photographing Flowers for Transparency | Part 2: Floral Arrangement and Exposing Thursday April 16, 2020 at 10AM PT click here for registration. Seats are limited. 


Photographing Flowers for Transparency | Part 3: Processing a High-Key Layer Stack Thursday April 30, 2020 at 10AM PT click here for registration. Seats are limited. 


Photographing Flowers for Transparency | Part 4: Advanced Topics in Post-Production Thursday May 7, 2020 at 10AM PT click here for registration. Seats are limited. 


Photographing Flowers for Transparency | Part 5: Over to You! Thursday May 21, 2020 at 10AM PT click here for registration. Seats are limited.


Photography as Poetry Tuesday April 14, 2020 at 10AM PT FREE, click here for advance registration (required). Seats are limited.


Staying Creative in Tough Times Saturday May 16, 2020 at 10AM PT FREE, click here for advance registration (required). Seats are limited.


Creative LAB Color | Part 1: Getting Started Saturday May 2, 2020 at 11AM PT click here for registration. Seats are limited. 


Creative LAB Color | Part 2: Advanced Topics Saturday May 9, 2020 at 11AM PT click here for registration. Seats are limited.

Stay tuned for more online events as we list them on this page. We will have both free and paid online webinars. Click here for the Workshops & Events page, and click here for the Webinar recordings page.

Into the Vortex of the Universe © Harold Davis

About Harold Davis: Harold Davis is a bestselling author of many books, including Creative Garden Photography from Rocky Nook, which can now be pre-ordered. He is the developer of a unique technique for photographing flowers for transparency, a Moab Master, and a Zeiss Ambassador. He is an internationally known photographer and a sought-after workshop leader. His website is www.digitalfieldguide.com.

Now for something completely different

In honor of Dada, surrealism, and April Fool’s Day, and for a good belly laugh, please check out my new video, GET SEXY — Guide to getting what you want for casuals! It may be as close as you’ll get in the time of Coronavirus.

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel! Stay healthy, sane, consensual, and socially distanced. We are in this together. Be mighty!

Wet Poppy Bud © Harold Davis

This Too Shall Pass—and What Then?

This too shall pass. It will take some time. Perhaps far longer than we’d like, and there will be tragic losses. The changes that will be wrought will be more fundamental and wide-ranging than most people realize at this point in time.

Civilization © Harold Davis

A new society will arise from the ashes. Let’s not give into the forces of authoritarianism and evil. Let’s use this as a learning experience to implement:

Universal health care
Less of a gap between rich and poor
More, better, and different education
More reflection and thoughtfulness about the way resources are shared and distributed
Practicing kindness, empathy, and communal feeling, along with respect for the individual

Of course, not everyone will agree with me about the new world we should build. But let’s take the silver lining in the cloud, and create a new order that appreciates art, and is gentler and more thoughtful.

Related stories: Love in the Time of the Coronavirus and Shopping in the Time of the Coronavirus.

Cycle of Life © Harold Davis

Relaxing Landscapes and Sunsets

Wants some pure escapism amid beautiful landscapes? Take a few minutes and check out my photos in a new video, Relaxing Landscapes and Sunsets. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel! Stay healthy and sane.

Night at Point Reyes Lighthouse © Harold Davis

Inflection Points and the Donut of Doom

Now that I have your attention! OK, the donut of doom does not refer to the Coronavirus pandemic, nor to Homer Simpson. Per the New York Times, “doughnut of doom” is an expression related to visualizations of black holes. And, is “doughnut” or “donut” the preferred spelling? Inquiring minds want to know.

Anyhow, please stand by. Since I can’t teach in person and am restricted to home, we are preparing to roll-out a series of Livestream Webinar Workshops. The live webinars will be posted for free download after a time delay on my YouTube channel.

See you virtually and online, and stay healthy!

Skim Ice on the Merced © Harold Davis

Cute Puppies and Subscribe to My YouTube Channel

Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel (it’s free to do, and helps us, too!). We are adding content every day, so check it out. The emphasis is on teaching photography, a good thing to practice while socially isolating and sheltering in place. But there is also some fun stuff! Like critters. Like cute puppies. And froggies. You get the picture (o:

Recent additions include:

Cute Little Critters—a fun little video of animal photography
My Google Talk about Black & White photography
Creative Floral Photography with Harold Davis, sponsored by Topaz Labs
Black and White Photography in the Digital Era, a live event at B&H Photo
Macro photography livestream: Harold Davis in conversation with Janice Sullivan on Macro Photography Live Chat

Cute White Puppies © Harold Davis

Double Feature

The Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, California may be closed while we shelter in place, but I am looking forward very much to the double feature coming soon: The Death of the Coronavirus plus The End of Donald Trump. Can’t wait!

Photo credit: Gaylord Burke. Used with permission.

Shopping in the Time of the Coronavirus

Shopping in the time of the Coronavirus starts with questions. How safe is it to go shopping? What is the risk-reward profile? Where are we on the curve of the pandemic?

What will be in stock? How long will the line to get in be? Will the store enforce the mandatory six-feet of separation? And, most of all, will someone sneeze and infect me (infecting my family with me as the vector)?

We are shopping for eight people.

The logistics of hygiene are formidable. We have N-95 masks in the car and a box of nitrile gloves. I leave everything at home that is non-essential to avoid having to wipe down anything extra.

We get up early and dress in clothes that will be easy to strip for washing before reentering the house.

We are ninjas. Queue the Mission Impossible music. We will rise before dawn and get there before the line.

When we get there, the line already snakes around the parking lot. There’s confusion, cars trying to drive through the line of people, a few outliers trying to cut into line.

Inside the store there’s a drive like a cattle stampede or a quickly darting shoal of fish, most wearing strange masks and gloves, towards the paper products. We are there early, in the special hours for old people, but there isn’t any toilet paper.

Come the Zombie Apocalypse I would consider going for the chocolate and cognac. It’s not clear to me that extra-soft TP would be my top priority.

The wine aisles are ransacked. There are no beans of any sort. There’s one box of UHT milk, one chicken pack, and one nasal-spray pack per party.

We spend close to a thousand dollars, and consider it money well spent. Like the folks that locked themselves in a deep mine for 5,000 years to survive catastrophe in Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, we are considering locking our garden gate behind us until this is all over.

Clematis with Friends (Inversion) © Harold Davis

Except this is probably a fantasy.

Before leaving the parking lot, door handles get wiped down with bleach, and gloves come carefully off and into a trash can.

Dropping some of the food off at my parents’ house, I leave their case of wine in the carport. We carry the food up to the front door and wave through the glass, leaving quickly so as not to risk any contact when they open the door.

They are querulous. They prefer fresh fruit and produce to the frozen stuff (who doesn’t?), and have been avoiding tuna and swordfish up to now because of mercury. Later, I’m told the tuna tastes good (at least it doesn’t have good taste, as the ad from my childhood declaimed), but I am sure they still are concerned about the mercury and too polite to say so.

In their nineties, my parents have been thrust into this new, impossible world. I feel that a bit of grumpiness is perfectly appropriate.

As one gets older, I do think that change is more difficult, and that it is harder to be flexible.

The only places I’ve ever personally seen food shortages and lines like this are in Cuba and Haiti.

Next stop is home. We do the hygiene protocol in reverse. Doors were left unlocked on latch. We bring the stuff into the kitchen, being careful to not let the kids touch it to help, even though they are eager to help.

The 50lb bag of sushi rice feels like it weighs fifty pounds at least when I carry it in. Good thing I’ve been practicing those farmer carries.

We go round to the front and strip buck naked. Everything is off, including shoes.

Then it’s into the shower, wash everything including hair and under nails, back into the kitchen. Unload everything out of cartons, squash the cartons into recycle, wash down again, and package the food into fridge, freezer, and pantry.

The past has gone irrevocably. This is the present. The future hasn’t come into focus yet. There are forks on the road ahead.

Road Less Traveled © Harold Davis

Love in the Time of the Coronavirus

Two of the best books I know that involve pandemics are the well-known classics Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Both involve great scourges of humanity through the ages, cholera and bubonic plague.

I think of Márquez’s book as an intellectual’s romantic parable about several kinds of love, in which the eponymous cholera plays a symbolic role to remind the reader that lovesickness is a disease, too.

But A Journal of the Plague Year has specific resonance with our times, and it gave me nightmares after I first read it many years ago. The narrative is apparently non-fictional, eye witnessed, and journalistic. When Defoe wrote his account in the 1720s, the last major bubonic plague was still within living memory in the late 1600s, although the narrator presents it as contemporaneous. In this fictional non-fictional account, grass grows in the once-busy streets of London, specific neighborhoods are traced as they succumb to plague, and the dead lie unnamed in vast Potter’s fields that remind one of the aerial views today of graves in Iran.

It’s more than possible that Defoe’s opus was propaganda-for-hire, intended to bolster the case in the 1720s for stronger protectionism and border controls. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

“May you live in interesting times” is apocryphally quoted as a Chinese curse, and these are truly times that would be more comfortable to learn about from a history book than to live through.

In this regard, as the Wizard Gandalf famously notes in the Lord of the Rings, we don’t really get to decide what time we live in: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Trying times bring out the worst in people. I am thinking right now of those who would bend the knee to the false God of money over the lives of people. But difficult times also bring out the best in people, heroes who care for others, such as the selfless front-line medical workers in the coronavirus pandemic, who are dying at an awful rate.

Tulips that Were © Harold Davis

In a very real sense, nature just doesn’t care. Through years spent hiking in the mountains from Alaska to Maine, I’ve learned that, however much one loves nature and loves being in nature, you just have to take nature as an extrinsic force that cannot be reasoned with. A storm at sea or a fall in the mountains can kill you perfectly, and without an iota of consciousness.

Anthropomorphism of the natural life force is, I believe, a mistake—unless intended as a metaphor. I’ve seen small blood-sucking leaches beside the trail in the jungles of Vietnam, blindly casting about for any warm-blooded creature, not because the leach is mean and ornery, but because that is what the leach does. This is much like the coronavirus infectious particle. It just seems evil to us, but it is merely doing what it does.

We are sheltering in place, a family of six. My parents, in their nineties, are alone in their own isolation behind glass doors. We bring them groceries; leave them outside the doors, wave kisses, and depart. They know that because of their age if they are hospitalized they will be the first to be sacrificed to triage, and offered palliation only.

Shopping is an excruciating experience of mask and glove protocol. We are allowed out for an exercise walk provided we keep six feet away from other people. This turns into an awkward social dance where pleasantries about “hanging in there” are exchanged while we subliminally jockey to see who will yield the right-of-way first.

These are the worst of times, and the best of times. I am at home with those I love more than anyone else in the world, my family. And, this too shall pass.

Once long ago when I traversed the Brooks Range in Alaska solo in deep fear for my life I was granted a vision that let me know I would be safe.

I was reminded of this when a few nights ago, deep in an anxiety dream about a vast car crash in which I was a passenger, the car I was in on a freeway swirled round and round in slower and slower spirals. I kept waiting for the fatal crash, but it never came. Instead, I heard a voice: “You will be okay.”

We will be okay.

Tulips that Were (Inversion) © Harold Davis

Reviving my ‘Zombie’ YouTube Channel

My YouTube Channel rises from the ashes. Thanks to my family helping (I’m watching Katie, my youngest, develop into one great project manager with great pride!) and sheltering in place, we are adding new content daily. It is free to watch, of course. Check it out!

Subscribing to the Harold Davis Photography and Digital Art YouTube Channel helps us make it better and add more content as we go along, in addition to the hours of free video instruction and inspirational material already there.

Enrich your photography and help us add more free content! So please subscribe by clicking the big red Subscribe button on my YouTube page. We are committed to building a large archive of inspirational and educational videos and information.

Clematis with Friends © Harold Davis

Stay well! Stay healthy! Have hope in these troubled times. We will survive. #weareinthistogether #artinthistogether #CantQuarantineArt

Harold Davis Photography and Digital Art YouTube Channel