Harold Davis's Blog, page 66
July 4, 2019
Storm in a Bottle
Carefully diffusing blue and yellow pigment into a bottle filled with water; related to Easy Travel to Other Planets.
Storm World © Harold Davis
Storm in a Bottle 1 © Harold Davis
Storm in a Bottle 2 © Harold Davis
“Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.”—Dust in the Wind, Kansas
July 3, 2019
More Food Play, and an iPhone Fragment
Here’s another food play image, constructed from olive oil, half-and-half (milk), and food color. I think it looks a little like stained glass.
Ink Blot 2 © Harold Davis
Transferring a high resolution image onto my iPhone allows me to use all the creative iPhone apps on an image generated by a “big boy” camera. This one (below) is a San Francisco Reflection, photographed with my D850 and modified with the Fragment app on my iPhone.
Time Travel Fragment © Harold Davis
Both images were a hecka lotta fun to make. That’s what it is all about to some extent: holding on to “beginner’s mind,” having a fun sense of play, and staying creative!
July 2, 2019
July 1, 2019
Garden Photography in Maine: Special July 4 Discount
There’s still time to enroll for my week long course in garden photography at Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine again this year. The dates are August 11-17, 2019. Click here for a full workshop description, and for registration.
Special July Sale: 20% Off. Use code JULY4PHOTO at checkout. Discount will be applied at final billing. July 4th at 7:00am through Sunday, July 7th at midnight.
Mandala with Clematis and Poppies © Harold Davis
Photographing Flowers for Transparency: Announcing the 2020 session
We’re pleased to announce the 2020 session of Harold’s acclaimed Photographing Flowers for Transparency weekend workshop, to be held in Berkeley, CA Saturday and Sunday June 20 and 21, 2020. Enrollment is limited. Registration is now open on a first-come-first-served basis.
Click here for more information about this workshop, here for the Photographing Flowers for Transparency FAQ, and here for Harold’s upcoming event, workshop, and destination photo tour schedule. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!
The Photographing Flowers for Transparency workshop is a great deal of fun, and covers Harold’s light box techniques as well as related topics (see the partial list below). If you are interested in Harold’s unique approaches, this is the best way to learn. Each participant will produce their own fully processed images following Harold’s lectures and demonstrations, and with Harold’s personal hands-on supervision.
Flowering Dogwood & Friends © Harold Davis
Topics covered in the Photographing Flowers for Transparency Workshop include:
Floral arrangement and composition
Botanical art in the digital era
Shooting on a light box
Understanding high-key post-production
Working with Photoshop layers
High-key HDR
LAB color effects
Backgrounds and textures
Preparing to make floral pigment prints
Tips & techniques from Harold Davis
Implementing one’s own vision
Flowers at School © Harold Davis
Here are what some participants in Harold’s recent Photographing Flowers for Transparency workshops have said:
“Harold is unmatchable! An honor to be able to be able to have him as a mentor…. for photography and for life.”
“AWESOME!!! Harold has a great teaching style, and it was great to learn some new shooting and post-processing techniques.”
“Excellent!!! Recommend to anyone who wants to take their flower art to the next level.”
“Amazing teacher! Patient, knowledgeable, thoughtful and sharing, easy to learn from. Looking forward to many more workshops with Harold! What a total gem… “
Floral Composition © Harold Davis
From Harold’s introductory note to workshop participants:
My belief is that folks learn most when they are hands-on, and having fun. So we will be doing a great deal of flower arrangement and flower photography—and I think along with new ways of seeing, you will learn some techniques, and ways of using your camera, that may not have occurred to you before.
These new approaches are great with flower photography, but also go way beyond floral subject matter, and are really applicable to many kinds of photography.
Besides floral photography, floral arrangement, working on a light box, and various kinds of special lighting effects, we will be exploring high-key HDR, post-production in Photoshop, backgrounds and textures, and LAB color, and much more. As you can see, it will be a very special, busy, and creative weekend!
Click here for more information about this workshop, here for the Photographing Flowers for Transparency FAQ, and here for Harold’s upcoming event, workshop, and destination photo tour schedule. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!
Kiss from a Rose © Harold Davis
June 30, 2019
Garden Photography Workshop – Capturing the Great Gardens of Maine – Time is running out!
There’s still time to enroll for my week long course in garden photography at Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine again this year. The dates are August 11-17, 2019. Click here for a full workshop description, and for registration.
I’m very excited to add some new, private gardens with exclusive access to this curriculum. This workshop is the only way you will get to see, let alone photograph, these gardens.
Besides field photography of gardens, the workshop will cover a variety of studio and post-production techniques related to flower photography (see the detailed description here). The goal is to help you create a coherent body of work related to garden and floral photography based on your unique vision.
Please consider joining me for a glorious week of Maine, photographing gardens, and flowers!
Giverny © Harold Davis
The agenda of this workshop includes plentiful field sessions in a variety of kinds of gardens accessible to Maine Media Workshops & College in Rockport on the mid-coast of Maine. August is a great time of year for flowers in bloom along the Maine coast! Classroom sessions will focus on specific areas of technique, and also the theory and practice of garden design in the context of photography, as well as working with individual participants to develop a cohesive and personal body of work. Click here for a full workshop description, and for registration.
Salutation to the Sun © Harold Davis
June 29, 2019
San Francisco Reflections
Wandering with a friend in downtown San Francisco last week, I was struck by all the new construction, and how much things have changed. Over the past half-dozen years I have mostly wandered more exotic paths—Son Doong Cave in Vietnam, the Kumano kodo in Japan, the Camino de Santiago, and more—and have seldom set foot in San Francisco.
The place has changed, almost beyond recognition. What struck me most in the area around Salesforce Tower is all the modern, reflective windows, which sometimes provide echoes of a distant and almost forgotten past, now alienated and completely separate from the present.
Rage Against the Grid © Harold Davis (1 Sansome St)
Time Travel © Harold Davis (1 Sansome St)
We cannot enclose the clouds © Harold Davis (1 Sansome St)
What windows do we want? © Harold Davis (45 Fremont St)
At the conclusion of our walk, we headed across the top of the Broadway Tunnel to Chinatown, which in contrast to the slicker downtown seems pretty much as it always was, a bustling enclave of tourists and Chinese-Americans doing their thing.
Here’s a “sort of take the photographer’s life in his hands” fisheye of the eastern mouth of the tunnel. You can see the light trail of a vehicle that was too close and too fast on the right of my position, and my companion as a kind of “ghost” on the left hand side of the image.
Broadway Tunnel © Harold Davis
June 28, 2019
Food ink blot
I made this image using milk, water, olive oil, vinegar, and food colors, and then photographed the result.
Food Ink Blot 1 © Harold Davis
June 27, 2019
June 24, 2019
Flowers that Remain
I had a great Photographing Flowers for Transparency workshop over the weekend, with a nice group of workshop participants who were eager to learn, and I think had fun! I’m looking forward to scheduling the workshop again next year, in June of 2020. If you are interested in this workshop, keep your eye out for it on my Workshops & Events page (or add yourself to my email list for an alert), as I do this workshop only once a year, and it does fill up.
What do you do with left-over flowers? There were quite a few that remained from the workshop, so I put them on my largest light box, and photographed them as a block of blossoms.
Flowers that Remain Behind © Harold Davis
Of course, it is hard to create a wall of flowers like this one without also wanted to invert the composition in LAB color.
Flowers that Remain Behind Inversion © Harold Davis
During the workshop, I created some demos to show various techniques. This first image was a collaboration, with workshop participants handing me flowers. I was arranging them in real-time in front of the group, which doesn’t have quite the serenity of the way I prefer to work, but was fun, and I think came out okay.
Bouquet © Harold Davis
I use this circular image to demo painting in transparency by sampling petals, and then painting in the values.
Mandala with Clematis and Poppies © Harold Davis
A singleton poppy made a nice and simple demonstration of the formula for adding a flower to a scanned background.
Poppy on Papyrus © Harold Davis
