iPhoto '09 appears simple on the surface. But there are sophisticated brains clicking away beneath that pretty face. I've discovered lots of things that I think you should know about iPhoto '09, and I'll show you as many as I can.

Late in the afternoon of a bright autumn day I arrived in Yosemite Valley. The valley was already in shadow, with only the tops of the surrounding cliffs lit by the sun. I stopped along the banks of the Merced River. With my camera on my tripod, I snapped five exposures of the scene, all at the same aperture (f/7.1)....

It's a long way from photographing wet cans in an alley to the abstraction you see here. The start was a recent rainy day and photography in the recycle bin in the alley next to our kitchen door. View this image larger. Before I get to the steps in the progression, let me say that I've noticed a pattern in...

On Photo.net recently Hannah Thiem conducted an interview with me. I think it's the best exposition about my work to date. (Suprada Urval's excellent interview with me covered very different ground.) As part of the interview, Hannah and I proposed an assignment: Photograph a flower in a unique way—in a way that nobody’s seen before. The top three submissions are...

Every year the cherry trees flower in the cultivated areas of the hills of California's coastal range, and of course I am impelled to photograph the blossoms. This season the cherry trees are flowering a tad early, like everything else in California in 2009. My thought was to create a simple image of cherry blossoms against a white background. The...

As a Photoshop instructor and author, I need to be skilled at using both Mac and Windows machines. And like most of my Photoshop instructor friends, I use a stylus and a tablet for maximum brush control. For my Mac, I use a Mac Book Pro, and I tote my WACOM table everywhere I go. For my Windows machine, I use the Lenovo W700 Think Pad. What's especially cool about this machine is that is has a built-in tablet and stylus. How cool is that.

Since the world is always changing, photography is largely about capturing states of things---scenes, objects, or people---in the process of change. A single image can intimate the before, and the after, and resonate with events to come. This sense of time is what gives many photographic images their power. My process of working on photos after they've been taken is...

Between committments at Macworld at the Moscone Center I wandered over and indulged my dome photography habit by photographing the dome in the Westfield shopping mall in downtown San Francisco. I believe the dome itself is antique, but it's placed in an entirely modern shopping mall. Cameo, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. It's easy with most domes...

What do Flickr, Blurb, and multiple sclerosis have in common? How can the combination contribute to the fight against MS, and maybe change the face of publishing at the same time? Several months ago I was contacted on Flickr by Sophie Addison, and asked to share my image Spirals in a book Sophie was creating titled It's a Beautiful World....

The current AirPort base station combined with iTunes, Apple TV, the iPhone, a handful of printers, and powered speakers have enabled me to configure an "upstairs/downstairs" network complete with printing and remote-controlled music streaming. Here's an overview.