We’ve had a couple of spells of really warm weather lately. This is an unusual pattern for the San Francisco Bay area in summer. It is well known that summer weather in San Francisco is often cold and foggy. On one of these hot and sultry summer days Mark and I started down the trail for [...]

Star Circles 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This is my second forty minute exposure of stars circling over the Point Reyes the other night. The original version was horizontal. As this exposure progressed, low-flying clouds were sweeping across the sky, softening and darkening the scene. At the extreme left of the [...]

Star Circles, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Two thousand four hundred seconds, about forty minutes. Actually longer, maybe three thousand five hundred seconds, or close to an hour, when you add in-camera noise reduction. I have mixed emotions when it comes to exposures that take this long. You don’t get many cracks at [...]

Big Dipper, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. While shooting the Star Trawler and Pole Star sequence, I noticed that the old, wrecked trawler Point Reyes could be shot facing due north so that Polaris would be centered within a circle of moving stars. I decided to come back to the spot on [...]

Star Trawler 1, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. This is a 1,204 second (or about twenty minute) exposure of the wrecked fishing trawler Point Reyes. I’ve photographed this boat before, but never at night. There was a bright moon in the sky, and as I walked across the mud flats behind the [...]

Two things are special to me about wandering the night with my digital camera. The first is the way I experience night. The second is the way a digital sensor can reveal colors and shapes in spite of apparent darkness. As a wanderer in the darkness, I enjoy more freedom of the hills than those who [...]

So It Begins, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. The lunar eclipse a few nights ago was already beginning when I got to Inspiration Point. Later, as the eclipse got fuller, it would be an issue of finding gaps in the cloud coverage. But to start with, the issue was to avoid overexposing the [...]

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Lunar Eclipse, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. A full lunar eclipse was scheduled just after moon rise in the early evening in the Bay area. My hope, foiled by roiling cloud cover blowing [...]