Art Is Where You Find It, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. We were getting the boys haircuts. At the hair cutting place I saw this mirror and reflections of bottles and the street. So I did the grab shot thing. I’m not maintaining this photo is a piece of great art per se. [...]

I’ve been spending so much time photographing Katie Rose in the NICU that I haven’t been photographing her big brothers much. Last week I remedied this, with several photo sessions in which I got down on the floor with the boys. As you’ll see in one of the photos, we also took the boys in [...]

Introduction to Clinical Psychology cover, image by Harold Davis. This is the cover of the 7th edition of Prentice Hall’s Introduction to Clinical Psychology textbook. The image is my composite of a spiral stair and a chambered nautilus shell. You can read the back story of the composite Spirals image here. Worth noting: this is a [...]

Swim Ladder, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. The reflections in the swimming pool ladder intrigued me because they looked like an abstract work in stained glass. I focused on three different points, using two different exposures for each focus point. The resulting image combines the six captures. [Nikon D300, 105mm f2.8 macro lens [...]

If you’re like me when it comes to wild and wacky Photoshop creations that start as digital photos, sometimes you don’t remember how you got to your end point. A related issue: sometimes in the process of experimenting one of the intermediate “experiments” seems better than the final version, so was it saved? How do [...]

Wright Stuff, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Is this a mechanical dragonfly? A musical instrument? Actually, the photo is looking up from the street level to one of the domes in the Marin Center that Frank Lloyd Wright designed. Related image: Wright Stairs. [Nikon D300, 10.5mm digital fisheye, 1/8 of a second at f/22 and [...]

Wright Stairs, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This is a photo taken looking straight up one of the smaller, back staircases at the Marin Center, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The results are almost abstract: I don’t think one is quite sure what one is looking at. There’s very little Photoshop work [...]

Looking Down, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. I took the original version of this photo (you can see it below) from the top of a rotunda in San Francisco City Hall. You can see a couple of people reading notices by a courtroom door, and the faint shadow of people in motion [...]

Door Knob Dome Scandal, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Everyone thought it a scandal when the door knob in my basement got together with the dome in San Francisco. But the dome and door knob were merely romantic, and invited a red rose, too.

Dome, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This is the interior of the dome of San Francisco City Hall. I lay on my back in the central space of the building, letting people flow around me. The wide-angle lens and straight-up point-of view combined to create the illusion of apparent flatness (actually the [...]

Nicky Jumping, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. On a recent trip to Alcatraz, Nicky started jumping in the exercise yard. I was mindful of Philippe Halsman’s famous portrait technique of asking his subjects to jump. As Halsman put it, “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the [...]

Rick Smolan gave me a coupon for a version of his book America at Home with a custom cover, and I put Julian and Nicky in the design (see below). Rick is famous for his Day in the Life series of photography books. Like many of Rick’s projects, America at Home is extraordinarily creative in concept. [...]

Door Knob, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This is an unmanipulated photo of a glass door knob. I’m mentioning that this is a straight photo as I have photo composition designs upon this door knob in which it will become one element in a greater whole. Time permitting, of course. The door knob [...]

Vertigo, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. I lay down at the bottom of the spiral staircase shown in After the Wedding. With my tripod fitting clumsily in a tight corner of the stair, I used my digital fisheye to take a vertiginous photo up the stair well. In Photoshop, I layered in [...]

Resurrection, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Are cougars reincarnated as flying insects? Anything is possible. This illustration is a Photoshop composite based on my mountain lion skull and dragonfly series.

Memory Palace, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This digital photo collage is an elaboration of Dream Palace, itself a manipulation of a photo of William Randolph Hearst’s over-the-top underground swimming pool. A memory palace, also called a method of loci, was a mnemonic system used for complex memorization in the days before [...]

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Pool, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This story is going to be one big whine about Hearst Castle as an abomination of an ersatz tourist trap and a monument of hagiography of a [...]

Happy Valentine’s Day! May you be in love and happy with your sweetie in a most commendably non-commercial way! This image of Hearts on Fire in the Sky is a Photoshop composite collage from almost three years ago, one of my first attempts at the genre.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Bunny, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Yawn, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.