Harold Davis's Blog, page 76

Star Gazer Lily

The Star Gazer Lily is more correctly StarGazer Lily or Lillium ‘StarGazer’, with “StarGazer” crammed together in one word. This Asiatic Lily is a fairly recent hybridization (circa 1974) of the Rubrim lily. The thing is that the flowers of the Rubrim lily faced downwards.

Downward facing petals were not popular with consumers. Leslie Woodriff, a California lily breeder, spotted a Rubrium that faced upwards. From the single specimen, he created the new hybrid, an Asiatic Lily with a builtin bias towards upward-facing flowers.

His name for the hybrid was a marketing success, and the StarGazer Lily has been a florist-industry megahit for many years. Of course, it helps that the Star Gazer is a beautiful flower, with a wonderful—but sometimes almost overwhelming—fragrance.

I made the close-up and almost abstract photos of a Star Gazer Lily shown below using a macro lens and an extension tube.

If you are interested in flowers, gardens, and flower and garden photography, I have a number of related workshops coming up in 2019:

Garden and Flower Photography in Florida, coming up in early February. This is the first flower photography workshop I have given in Florida, and I excited about exploring the flora of the sunshine state with others who love botanical photography. Click here for more information and registration.
Photographing the Great Gardens of Maine, scheduled for mid-August at Maine Media Workshops in Rockport. We have some exciting new gardens to photograph this year, with exclusive access. The information and a registration link is to be announced shortly.
Photographing Paris in the Spring : One of the highlights of this destination photo workshop is an after-hours exclusive artist access to Monet’s garden at Giverny. Click here for more information.
Photographing Flowers for Transparency : this hands-on weekend workshop in Berkeley, California in June teaches the technique I have developed to create high-key, transparent floral images using a light box. Click here for more information and registration.

Star Gazer Lily 1 © Harold Davis

Star Gazer Lily Anther © Harold Davis

Star Gazer Lily 3 © Harold Davis

Star Gazer Lily 4 © Harold Davis

Related story: Anthers in Love.

Cosmic Misunderstanding

Somewhat in the spirit of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, maybe it is all a misunderstanding on the cosmic scale, with the universe a multidimensional freeway interchange where we’ve all forgotton our towels!

Check out my new online Gallery of Abstracts.

Abstract 15 – Cosmic Misunderstanding © Harold Davis

Related stories: The Making of the Abstractions; Abstracts and a Photographic Mystery; More Abstractions; Easy Travel to Other Planets; Life is Strange.

Life Is Strange—Further Abstractions and some Abstract Thoughts

Life is strange. We take inspiration, and the other self-actualization needs and desires that are high up the Maslow hierarchy, where we can find them. From within the prison of the ego, the globe of the world matters little—belonging and cathexis matter, even if only for a single night. Fire and ice, kindness and depravity, battle for the crystal palace of my soul.

Abstraction 12 – Life is strange © Harold Davis

Abstract 11 – Dome of the World © Harold Davis

Abstract 10 – Be Mine Tonight © Harold Davis

Abstract 9 – Fire and Ice © Harold Davis

Abstract 8 – Crystal Palace © Harold Davis

Related stories: The Making of the Abstractions; Abstracts and a Photographic Mystery; More Abstractions; Easy Travel to Other Planets.

Easy Travel to Other Planets

Related stories: The Making of the Abstractions; Abstracts and a Photographic Mystery; More Abstractions!

First Contact © Harold Davis

Red Planet © Harold Davis

Blue Planet © Harold Davis

Ice Planet © Harold Davis

Twin Planets © Harold Davis

Event Horizon © Harold Davis

Extinction Burst © Harold Davis

Silence of the Deep © Harold Davis

Exploring the Sacramento Delta

The Steamboat Slough Bridge, shown here from underneath, was built in 1924. According to HistoricBridges.org, this bridge is a good example of a Strauss heel-trunnion bascule bridge. Despite some repair work in 1953 and again in 2000, the bridge is much like it always was.

Beneath Steamboat Slough Bridge © Harold Davis

Something of the same sort can be said for the Sacramento River delta. This is an area that time forgot, almost a foreign country in the backyard of the San Francisco metropolitan area, and adjacent to Sacramento, the California state capital.

Murmuration © Harold Davis

Driving the hour or so from my home in Berkeley to California Route 160, also known as River Road, which bisects the delta, my friend Jim and I weren’t sure what to expect. We found a vast low country, only a few feet above sea level, formerly wetlands and marsh, now ranch and agricultural land. Wind turbines and transmission towers sit astride the low-lying landscape. 

Two Towers © Harold Davis

The innumerable channels of the Sacramento River have created a maze of islands, with a reedy fringe on the banks and agriculture inland. Small roads cross the channel on bridges like the one across Steamboat Slough, or one of the many operational car ferries.

Real McCoy II (via iPhone) © Harold Davis

There are a few towns in the Sacramento delta, principally Ryde, Walnut Grove, and Locke, along with trailer parks and vineyards.

Wonder Bread (via iPhone) © Harold Davis

Ryde’s principle tourist attraction is Foster’s Bighorn—a bar and lunch place featuring hundreds of stuffed big game heads. They were really gracious about letting me photograph inside with my camera and tripod, but I really can’t bring myself to process any of the images. I also don’t see how one could really enjoy one’s brisket sandwich with the myriad glass eyes of lions, bears, and elephants staring at one.

Locke was a Chinese community, which swelled with seasonal agriculture hands who worked the delta. Today it seems to be an outing destination from Sacramento, with Chinese restaurants, a Chinese herbal medicine practitioner, and even the “Locke Ness: Things Old & Odd” curio museum and shop. Nearby Walnut Grove is the largest town in the area, and features grocery stores with ads from the 1950s (when was the last time you saw a loaf of Wonder Bread?).

There’s a sense of strangeness and otherness about the delta, and also, in a weird way, of permanence. This is country that makes you think that AI, fake news, and all the other stuff we think about every day, can only be the invention of some dissonant, alternative sci-fi future.

Threatening this permanence is the Delta Tunnel Plan. This hypothetical project, beloved by Governor Brown, and mired in innumerable law suits, would build two four-story tunnels under the delta to carry water from the delta to the Central Valley, and the always-thirsty cities of California’s arid south. 

Businesses of all sorts around the delta have anti-Tunnel Plan placards prominently displayed. Should the Tunnel Plan ever come to pass, it will drain the delta of the one resource it has in abundance—good, clean, flowing water—and change the land more than any other human action since the marshes were drained in the years following the great California gold rush. As with any project that projects changes of this magnitude, the downstream consequences—to the great Bay of San Francisco and beyond—are hard to know.

More abstractions!

Related stories: The Making of the Abstractions; Abstracts and a Photographic Mystery.

Abstract 4 © Harold Davis

Abstract 5 © Harold Davis

Abstract 6 © Harold Davis

Abstract 7 © Harold Davis

The Making of the Abstractions

Abstract 3 © Harold Davis

This image and the two other abstracts shown in a previous story were constructed by allowing strong sunlight to pass through bottles filled with fluid (dark brown maple syrup and red wine). In the foreground I placed glassware (a wine cup stem in this image, flower vases in the previous two). A water glass made of blue glass added some reflected color to the images.

I photographing the setup extremely close with a very low depth-of-field, hand holding a Lensbaby Sweet 85 wide open (at f/1.8) with an extension tube, and using short duration shutter speeds (e.g., 1/2000 of a second). The result was extremely shallow focus and a painterly effect for everything out of focus, and clearly the precise point of focus was a crucial issue. I do think this would have been hard to pull off without an optical viewfinder.

Thanks to everyone who hypothesized in comments on my blog and on my IG feed!

Abstracts and a Photographic Mystery

Here’s a photographic mystery for you! Can you reverse engineer these abstracts? As a hint, these were essentially created in the camera, with very minimal Photoshop processing in post-production (just a little cleaning up and enhancing colors slightly).

If you think you know how this series of abstracts was made, please comment with camera and lens, subject matter, lighting, and setup.

Abstract 1 © Harold Davis

Abstract 2 © Harold Davis

Cefalu

Wandering through the Sicilian village of Cefalu, I made my way to the harbor jetty. Looking back at the whitewashed village, it was clear that from a monochromatic perspective, the contrast between the white buildings and the black headland behind them was very interesting. I made a series of bracketed exposures that would enable me to take advantage of this contrast once I had converted the photo to black and white.

Cefalu © Harold Davis

Nikon D850, 44mm, 6 Exposures at f/29 and ISO 64, shutter speeds ranging from 1/10 to 1/160 of a second, tripod mounted; processed to monochrome using Nik HDR Efex Pro.

Related story: Accordion Player.

Correlation versus Causality

In downtown Palermo, Sicily, at the intersection of Via Maqueda and Via Vittorio Emanuele is an ornate and baroque piazza, surrounded by four symmetrical structures with statues in niches. Dubbed Quattro Canti—“Four Corners”—it is actually hard to give a sense of the overall ornamentation overload of the location. Often closed to vehicular traffic, usually with one or more street musicians performing, Quattro Canti was a fun place to hang out. I kept trying to pre-visualize how to make an image that captured both the over-the-top baroque ornamentation of the place along with the sense of place generated by the symmetry of the four buildings, but in practice none of my ideas really seemed to live up to the reality.

Correlation versus Causality © Harold Davis

This image consists of two photos. Both were taken from the center of Quattro Canti with my camera on the tripod, and both used my Nikkor 8-15mm fisheye lens. The outer image was made with the lens set to 15mm, so it is categorized as a rectangular fisheye. The inner image, which is repeated twice at different sizes, was photographed at 8mm, so it is a circular fisheye image. And, yes, LAB color inversions were used to create the final.

Regarding my title, Correlation versus Causality, I am mindful of a story about Picasso. Apparently, he hated giving his paintings titles, and thought they should speak for themselves. Sometimes his dealers forced him to come up with a title. He claimed to use the first thing that came to his mind, and enjoyed listening to critics hashing out the meanings of the titles he had given so heedlessly.