Lost Mesa, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Following up on my threat (or was it a promise) to add waterfalls to a pine cone, I’ve created an impossible world. When I’m not taking kids to the Adventure Playground, this is how I spend my weekends! Besides the pine cone, this Photoshop composite [...]

The Riddle, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Briefly noted: What is the question? What is the answer? There’s a story here. But it’s carefully guarded by this pair of sphinxes who take their modeling seriously. IR capture with human (and stone) models at the Mountain View Cemetary in Oakland, California.

The Dictator’s Architect, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Briefly noted: This Photoshop composite includes pieces of governmental architecture from a number of places, including San Francisco’s City Hall and Fulgenica Batista’s Presidential Palace in Havana, Cuba. My idea was to create an architectural fantasy reminscent of a Piranesi etching. I wanted the [...]

Faking Star Trails, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. I faked these star trails. Meaning that this image is not based on an exposure, or combined composites of exposures, long enough to produce the star trails shown. The simulated star trails are an effect created in Photoshop from a single, relatively short exposure. [...]

Alien Fresh Jerky, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. I used this photo in a demonstration for our new Photoshop Darkroom 2: Creative Digital Transformations. The point was to show Photoshop CS5′s new content-aware fill feature. I used content-aware fill to automatically remove the power wires from the original photo. As I noted [...]

Eye Pluribus, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This is a composite photo collage created in Photoshop—as if you couldn’t tell! The background image shows the shadow of a flower backlit on a piece of tracing paper (below, top). The ocean view is an evening shot of surf at Drakes Beach (below, middle). [...]

Katie Rose Tutu Head, photo by Harold Davis. Katie Rose likes to wear her tutu on her head, as you can see in this studio portrait. I’ll get over what a miracle she is someday (maybe)—but in the meantime it is hard for me to photograph her or write about her without remembering. Here are [...]

Papaver Rhoeas Portrait, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Mathew Viking, photo by Harold Davis. Mathew dressed up in a knight’s tunic and plastic Viking helmet seems no one to mess with, particularly with the sword in hand and glint in his eye. So do what Mathew says. He says, Try out the new Harold Davis – Photoshop Darkroom iPad/iPhone app. It’s free, fun, good photos, [...]

Flying Dragon, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. We grabbed our four kids and brought them into the controlled environment of a studio. Actually, the environment became uncontrolled the moment we introduced our four kids (plus a friend of Nicky’s). Five kids in a studio space along with toys, costumes, swords, and a [...]

Orbit, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Head down and hard at work on a new book project, it was fun this morning to take a break. My break coincided with a break in the weather—so I got to photograph these beautiful water drops orbiting in the space around the flower that is [...]

Forest Awakening, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. The forest is a wonderful and magical place. Wandering along the dreary forest floor past fallen leaves, branches and spider webs suddenly the sun may beam through. You never know: those rays may hit a special rock in a sacred grove. Suddenly awake, the rock [...]

Boathouse Still Life, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. The Workshop Gods were with me last weekend. The weather was stunning, never to be taken for granted on the tip of Point Reyes, and the spring wild flowers were lucious. The participants were strong photographers, and a socially compatible group—neither of which is [...]

Life Is Full of Beauty, photo by Harold Davis. In David Lynch’s wonderfully creepy classic film Blue Velvet you know you’ve entered an alternative and not altogether wholesame nether world when severed body parts start appearing at macro level in the grass. In the Blue Velvet spirit, I am offering a prize to the first person [...]

Infrared Alice, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This is a capture of Alice using a camera retrofitted to only shoot IR. Rendition of colors (or black and whites in this case) is quite odd using IR and seems to depend on the light source—studio strobe lighting in this capture. If you look [...]

Hood Ornament, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. I don’t think I’d want one of these in my belly button, but on this model it creates a pretty interesting landscape.

This cougar head occupies a place of honor in Papa Hemingway’s dressing area at the Hemingway Museum in the suburbs of Havana, Cuba. Photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. A Tale of Two Papas Here’s a quick, trick question: Name a big, bearded public figure associated with Cuba who combined machismo with narcissism, had a [...]

Inside the Tower, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. These two images are of the tower above the Palacio Ferrer in Cienfeugos, Cuba. I shot both the interior and exterior views with a 10.5mm digital fisheye—then combined each with a mirrored version of itself. Depending on how you look at things, the effect [...]

Alter Ego, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. I photographed this gourd in Joseph’s studio. It seems the inner gourd has the soul and shadow of a dinosaur—aided and abetted by some good sushi and a white eye added to the shadow in Photoshop.

Looking Up, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This is looking up the spiral staircase in the Edificio Cuervo Rubio in La Habana, Cuba. Here’s the view looking down the same staircase.