Harold Davis's Blog, page 7

Blowing in the Wind

I’ve talked—and written—about designing a structure behind an apparently free-form image. With flower photography on a light box, possible forms this structure can take include a bouquet, a garden patch of upright flowers, and a mandala, to name a few compositional ideas.

Blowing in the Wind © Harold Davis

With Blowing in the Wind (above) I decided to try a variant of the garden of flowers. Using an underlying grid made up of two-week irises (Dietes, also called “Fortnite Lily” and “African Iris”), I curved the structure to the right, as though the garden patch were in fact blowing in the wind.

If you are interested, the two-week iris has its informal name because it seems to bloom every two weeks. A clump of these flowers grow essentially wild in my garden with very little tending; in fact, all the blossoms in this series of images are straight from my garden.

I’ve tried to make the flowers in a light box arrangement appear to be responding to a strong wind before, but it is not my most common approach. For example, this star magnolia is similarly arranged to appear to be bending in the wind, as flowers in the great outdoors do, and so in their own way are the flowers partying in Flowers Party Too!

Triumph of Beauty over Despair © Harold Davis

In recent times, I’ve taken advantage of my existing arrangements to hone in on relatively small sections of the composition. Fresh flowers from the garden have a short half life, and I feel better about taking the life of the blossom for photography more than once. I’ve called this secondary kind of work Artfully Random. It’s discussed in more detail here, and you can also view my album of Artfully Random images on Flickr.

Triumph of Beauty over Despair (above) follows the Artfully Random playbook, with a twist: the underlying, orderly grid structure created by the stems of the two-week lilies clearly organizes the image, so it’s not really about randomness in any sense.

Let the Flowers Fall © Harold Davis

The final image in this series, Let the Flowers Fall (above), adheres more clearly to the Artfully Random paradigm. With this image, my thought was to make the blossom appear to be falling, particularly the red poppies on top and right sides. In this way, I tried to echo Yosemite’s famous fire fall of yesteryear, as seen these days in the scene at Horsetail Falls.

Check out my upcoming “garden” of postage stamps.

Prints on Slickrock Pearl

My client was a designer working on the decor for a luxurious vacation home for a well-to-do photography collector. The designer’s request for the prints once the collector had selected the images was they should be made so that “the prints popped and were exciting.” 

To meet the specification, I choose Moab Slickrock Pearl Metallic as my substrate. I’m happy that both the designer and the collector were pleased with the results.

The four images are shown in larger size below. The images were created between 2009 and 2015. If you want to learn more about each image check out the links to the original blog stories I wrote at the time of image creation (below).

Disclosure: Moab Paper sponsors me, for which I am very, very grateful.

Tree Line © Harold Davis

This is a shot looking almost straight up at the line of trees in the late afternoon in the Parc de Sceaux (pronounced “Park de So“)…original blog story.

Museum at Bodie © Harold Davis

This image of the museum at the old ghost town of Bodie was created from six exposures using High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques. Each exposure as at 18mm, f/22, and ISO 200, with my camera on a tripod. The exposure times ranged from 1/60 of a second to six seconds….original blog story.

Strahov Monastery Library © Harold Davis

The photo in this story is of the Philosophical Hall, part of the library of the massive Strahov Monastery in the hills above Prague in the Czech Republic which I just got around to processing. Strahov Monastery was founded in 1143, and is a Premonstratensian abbey….original blog story.

Kiss from a Rose © Harold Davis

The lighting, photography, and post-processing of this image all had the same goal: to increase saturation and tonal contrast and create a kind of “Georgia O’Keefe” effect. This is a set of techniques I’ve already used in my Variegated Rose (shown at the top of Photoshop Credo)….original blog story.

Composition and Photography Masterclass by Harold Davis

Please consider joining me for an online Composition and Photography Masterclass sponsored by RockyNook. 

Thursday, July 11, 2024 at 10am PT; click here to register.

Description: Learn the fundamentals of composition in photography with internationally renowned artist and photographer Harold Davis.

“To create exciting compositions, you must have a willingness to embrace serendipity and change as part of your artistic process. After all, composition is a process not a result” – Harold Davis

Good composition is a fundamental building block of photography. It is easy to recognize, but hard to achieve. In this live 2-hour online masterclass and Q&A, internationally renowned artist, photographer and best-selling Rocky Nook author Harold Davis well help guide photographers at any level to improve their compositions. Read more below the image!

Meditation © Harold Davis

What will be covered?

Work with shapes such as lines, circles, and rectanglesUnderstand directionality, entering, and exiting in compositionWork with patterns and repetitionRecognize and use positive and negative spaceUse the various kids of abstractions in your own work

Outcome:

Learn the fundamentals of compositionHelp to develop your own personal styleInspire your creativity

When?

Thursday, July 11th, 202410.00am – 12.00pm Pacific TimeClick here to register

This online course will be recorded – As a participant you will be sent a password-protected link to the video recording to re-watch at your convenience.

About the Presenter

Harold Davis is an artist, photographer, educator, and the bestselling author of many books. His most recent books include Composition & Photography, Creative Garden Photography, and Creative Black & White, all from Rocky Nook.  

Harold is the developer of a unique technique for photographing flowers for transparency, for which he was awarded the 2022 Photographic Society of America Progress award. According to Popular Photo Magazine, “Harold Davis’s ethereal floral arrangements have a purity and translucence that borders on spiritual.”  

Harold is also known as a master of black and white. The Seattle Times put it this way: “Harold Davis is the digital black and white equal of Ansel Adams’s traditional wet photography.” He is a Moab Master, and a Zeiss Ambassador, and an internationally known photographer, as well as a sought-after workshop leader. In 2022 and 2024, a number of Harold’s floral images were produced as United States postage stamps. 

Iris

Mostly the irises in my garden have already bloomed for the year. But this one is an exception! And exceptional! I love the textures and folds in this wonderful flower. I placed in the vase I brought back from last year’s trip to Japan, and photographed it against a white seamless background.

Iris © Harold Davis

Click here for a suite of Iris close-ups!

It’s Official: Create a Garden on an Envelope with my USPS Stamps!

I’m pleased and excited to report that five new “miscellaneous” stamps of my work have been announced by The United States Post Office. The first date of issue is July 18, 2024, with the first day place of issue (in an appreciated nod I think to my hometown) in Berkeley, California.

The five stamps, the one cent Fringed Tulip, the two cent Daffodils, the three cent Peonies, the five cent Red Tulips, and the ten cent Poppies and Coneflowers, are shown below. Click here for my 2022 stamps.

What seems like a very cool idea to me (thanks Ethel!) is to cover an envelope with my stamps, thus creating a garden. I’m certainly going to do this!

 

 

 

 

 

Garden in Bloom

How wonderful to come home to my garden in full bloom! Ah, but the flowers are almost overwhelming…so much color, so much growth. I am greeted by hummingbirds. They hover above and in front of me, as if to ask where have you been? I visit the papavers, the beds of alstroemeria, the tender Magnolia stellata, recently planted and recovering well from a fungus. 

Garden in Bloom © Harold Davis

Why, I wonder, why travel when all this awaits at home? A great question. Penelope knew the travails of being left at home, but Odysseus undoubtedly wearied of the long years away.

But perhaps the answer is the glory of the homecoming. Until one travels, one never knows how much one misses home, has taken home for granted, longs for it, and how grand is the return to the garden in full bloom. Perhaps the glory of the homecoming is well worth the weariness of the long road.

Derreen Garden

It was lightly raining, more like a heavy mist, when we visited Derreen Garden in Lauragh, Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. The history of this garden is interesting. In the 1870s, the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne, the owner of the land, decided to transform a bare rock and scrub oak hillside into a luxurious, sub-tropical garden. He planted a collection of shrubs and specimen trees brought back from his sojourns serving in the colonial empire (he was the viceroy of India among other appointments).

Derreen Garden © Harold Davis

Today, the most famous feature of the 60 acre garden are the large tree ferns from Australia and Tasmania. I also enjoyed the plentiful rhododendron, which were in glorious bloom. As a whole, the garden conveys an intoxicating mix of the wild and the cultivated, and melds in a wonderful way with the larger landscape of County Kerry.

County Kerry

What does County Kerry, Ireland have in common with my hometown, Berkeley in California? One thing in common is infinitely changeable weather. As in the San Francisco area, in County Kerry one moment it is raining, the next it is sunny, then more clouds come along, and so on. A vastly beautiful and luscious in green landscape.

County Kerry © Harold Davis

Kinard Beach

Kinard Beach is on the Dingle peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland. Dingle and the Dingle peninsula ares truly magical places, with frequent rain, changeable weather, and mountains slipping into the wild Atlantic ocean. As you can see in the photo, the wild Atlantic is formidable indeed, and in marked contrast to the verdant green farms and rugged hillsides of the interior, not far from the brink of the ocean.

Kinard Beach © Harold Davis

Photographing close to “home”

With so much rain the past week in the southwest of France, some of our photography has been close to “home”. These are iPhone captures. The top image is of bottles in Sarah’s kitchen, with an antique finish and vignetting added using Snapseed on my iPhone.

Bottles © Harold Davis

The window blind below is in my bathroom at the Mas de Garrigue. You can see the swimming pool as a hint of blue on the lower left. There is no post-processing on the image.

Window © Harold Davis

The final image (below) is of a light fixture on the ceiling of the living room at Noubar’s (this one is also straight from the camera).

Light © Harold Davis