Photographer of the Week: Harold Davis

As I briefly mentioned in my last post, flowers are one of my favourite subjects to photograph. I love capturing them up close with my macro lens and experimenting with a variety of different focal lengths, apertures and shutter speeds to find an interesting combination which results in a beautiful shot. I also love capturing them in really abstract ways so it’s difficult to tell that the image is one of a flower. This is why I have chosen to focus on the work of Harold Davis throughout this post as his work always inspires me when I’m working with flowers.

Harold Davis is an award-winning, contemporary, American photographer who creates his own unique methods to produce extremely eye-catching images. There is such a huge amount of variation between every image of his despite them all being of the same subject matter (flowers). His use of colour is incredible; every image he takes is always bursting with such vibrant colours. Above are just a few examples of his work that I like in particular, most of his images can be found at his flick page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/harold_davis/) or on his blog (http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/blog).

© 2013 Hannah Bennett

Here is an image of mine that I took in the style of Harold’s work, focusing on just the stigma of this tulip to create an abstract quality within the shot, making the flower look almost alien-like as a result of the extremely shallow depth of field I have achieved by using a low aperture to blur the anthers behind and the petals in the far background.

There is one technique in particular that Harold Davis is known for, and that is his ‘lightbox’ technique. He creates beautiful pictures of flowers by placing them on a lightbox to give them a soft transparent look like this one displayed to the right. I have attempted this before and the outcome was unsuccessful but I would really like to master it so I am planning on attempting it again at some point in the future. I shall do a blog post with the result if I manage to achieve a shot worth sharing.