It all started when I pointed my digital camera into the void of night and was surprised by the results. In apparent darkness, there's plenty of "light" we cannot see that is picked up by digital sensors. The digital night landscape is very colorful indeed. Since this discovery, I have haunted dark and wild landscapes at night...[Read more]. My new...

The term bokeh is used to refer to blurring in a photograph. Good bokeh is smooth and pleasing, whereas bad bokeh produces a jagged and discordant effect. This may sound subjective, but pretty quickly you can get to recognize excellent bokeh when you see it in a photo. And the effort of doing so will help you improve your photography....

What has a flexible rubberized tube, like a short version of the hose you find on a vacuum cleaner, and a piece of optical glass at the end? Why, my Lensbaby, of course: a specialized interchangeable lens that fits Nikons, Canons, and other dSLRs. The point of this somewhat bizarre but dearly beloved piece of photo gear? To allow a...

When I came back to photography in early 2005, I confronted a world gone digital and virtual. On the whole, I thought this was a good thing, and I was pretty clear that digital photographs are different from film photographs. One thing I didn't get yet: that physical prints had a place in this new virtual world. View this image...

My five-year-old son Nicky likes to ask me, "When is a door not a door?" Before I can answer, he tells me, "When it's a jar," and cackles wildly. In the same general spirit, I'd like to ask, when is a photograph not a photograph? My answer, and imagine me cackling wildly, is that a photograph is not just a...

Why should you take a photography workshop? One answer is that you'll learn something specific. For example, if you take my workshop Digital Workflow: From the Field to Flickr (I'll be giving it next at the Santa Fe Workshops from July 7-14) you'll learn a great deal about shooting digital under field conditions, and come away from my workshop with...

Why am I so interested in photographing water drops? What are the special challenges and techniques associated with photographing water drops? Do different water drops have different characteristics (in other words, is there a taxonomy of water drops from a photographer's perspective)? Orchid Water Drop, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger. Read more about this image. Leaving the...

Wilder Shore, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Read more about this image. OK, let's start with two questions. Would you think the photo above was taken into almost complete night? And why would someone go to a great deal of trouble to hike out into the wilds somewhere, mount their camera on a tripod, and take...