Harold Davis

Note: This is a repost of a story I originally wrote in November, 2007.

The Wave #1, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a photograph taken at the Wave, a beautiful geologic wonder of the world. Chambers, striations, passages: it’s hard to describe the wonders of this place. So I’ll be posting photos to show, not tell.

The Wave is in a special administration area, which is rather well run by the Kanab district office of the BLM (Bureau of Land Management, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior). BLM regulations cap the number of people per day at 20, 10 selected by advance lottery, and ten first come first served. BLM regulations also specify that everything packed in must be packed out, including human waste.

When you get your permit, the BLM gives you a kit with a series of maps and photos. There’s no trail as such, and a lot of the hike is across slick rock. But the BLM treasure-hunt kit is great, it shows you photos correlated with a strip topographic map of what you should be seeing each step along the way.

People, particularly photographers, flock to the Wave from around the world. May and October are the most popular months (the summer is just too danged hot and dangerous), but April and November are also good times to visit.

When I got to the Wave, the central area was occupied by three German photographers who were very loud, smoking heavily, and whose gear was all over the place. This was offensive to me. A place like the Wave is the closest thing I have to a church. How would these visitors from Germany have felt about someone behaving in a similar fashion in the middle of a Gothic church in the ancient downtown of a medieval German city?

The photo above shows a side corridor or chamber (you can walk through it) lit by the setting sun. I used a polarizer filter to maximize the color saturation, and an exposure of two seconds at f/22 to get the most depth of field I could.

In Perspectives, I wrote “I have found my center, and know what I am. I can hike the canyon rims, photograph sunset, and come down by starlight.” It’s dangerous to take wilderness casually, and to be over confident. You know what pride cometh before as well as I do.

I stayed at the Wave long after everyone else had left to photograph by the light of sunset, and then to make a thirty minute exposure by starlight of the Wave. Sunset comes early this time of year, and the jumbled country around the Wave would be very dark at night. Still, I figured I’d have no problem reversing the order of the BLM checkpoints using my headlamp.

In the event, I had the light of the crescent moon for the first twenty minutes or so of my hike. Then the moon set, and I lost my way. The route was marked by cairns, which are rock piles, marking the way across the slick rock. I saw one cairn, but not the next. Foolish me, I figured I knew the direction I was headed.

From then on, it was like a bad dream. I was up and over mounds and around dry basins. The land seemed to be driving me to steeper and steeper ground, and it was hard to tell in the light of my beam whether a drop-off was three feet, thirty feet, or three hundred feet. In the best of times, this is confusing maze-like terrain, let alone on a dark night. Pretty soon, I’d forgotten how to get back to my starting point. The shapes of mountains and canyons loomed larger and larger, and I didn’t seem to remember anything like this from the fairly brief hike in.

I’d see a stone ramp, go up, meet an obstacle to go around, find another way, and even my recent history was lost.

I realized that this couldn’t go on. It was very hard to see where I was going. I was getting very tired after a long day on little food, with lots of exertion photographing. My water was low. To continue in the circumstances was to risk breaking my neck.

So the next time I found myself on a platform facing what looked like a precipice opening at my feet, I stopped. I had a down jacket, and knew I wouldn’t die of hypothermia in one night.

But it was so, so cold. I paced all night in a small circle, like Gandalf on top of Orthanc. I used the last of my camera batteries to photograph star trails. I enjoyed the cosmic light show in the sky and tried to ignore chattering teeth. I meditated on being lost in the desert and on whether my life insurance was adequate for Phyllis and the kids. (I spent another cold night vigil on top of Half Dome not so long ago, so I’m actually experienced at this!)

As the pale light of dawn began to illuminate things, I was glad I had stopped. Between impassable crags, a gorge and network of crevasses opened at my feet. I turned around, and began to make my way back down, coming shortly to the cairn-marked route, which I had crossed without recognizing it in the night.

A couple of hundred feet closer to the trailhead, I met one of the BLM people coming in. He said he was running late. I said I was running even later, and told him my story, admitting to feel a bit embarrassed. He told me I wasn’t the first, it happens lots of times (if that’s a consolation). We talked about contacting my wife so she wouldn’t call out search and rescue. He said heck, when he’s in the office, he ignores calls for search and rescue for two or three days because “they usually show up”, and, heck, where are you going to start looking for someone in this crazy, convoluted terrain, anyway?

When all is said and done, I’m thrilled with my time at the Wave (thought not my cold and sleepless night). I’ve many interesting photos to look through and post-process. But in the future I’ll try to be less prideful about my relationship with the wilderness.

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 Tennessee Beach well after sunset. It was night by the time we reached the ocean. The stars were out and the moon hadn’t risen yet. It was cool and relaxing after the hot day sitting on a ledge above the beach in the darkness.

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I made four exposures while we sat and chatted. Everything looked dark, so I was surprised to see oodles of color in the LCD screen after each exposure. No matter how many times this happens, it always surprises me. In an apparently dark and monochrome world, there are transcendentally beautiful colors.

Vincent van Gogh put it this way: “It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day.”

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Where do the colors in these images come from? I’ve two theories: possibly the colors in the clouds are ambient light from the city of San Francisco, reflected off clouds and around the bend. Also, some of the colors may be left over from the sunset. I’ve noticed that these colors do grow less vivid as the night progresses.

Our human eyes simply don’t have great sensitivity to the light waves that are present after sunset. (Vincent van Gogh may have been an exception.) Digital sensors do, and maybe animals of the night see these colors as well.

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At a recent workshop I gave, I was asked whether I worked to recreate a scene the way I saw it when I was there. I answered, to a certain amount of gasping, that actually I didn’t care what a scene I photographed “really” looked like; my concern was for the way my imagery came out.

Of course, the merits of photographic fidelity to a subject depend on the goal of an image. Journalistic photographers and documentary photographers are correctly held to a standard of recreating the actual look of their subjects. On the other hand, advertising photographers have the intentional goal of misleading by exaggerating the visual benefits of the products they shoot. I believe, as a photographer with the stated goal of creating art, that what “was there” when I took the original photo is essentially irrelevant.

One reason I use the term “image” to describe the pictures I make, rather than “photo” or “photograph”, is to say that my work cannot necessarily be regarded as a literal depiction.

It takes work to tease these colors out of my RAW files. True, I couldn’t tease them at all if something wasn’t there in the first place. But still, in someone else’s hands these images would be processed very differently.

For me, I care far more about the final visual result than the classification of the technology used to create the image. I’d be happy to use digital photography and post-processing to make night landscapes in the tradition of van Gogh’s magnificent Starry Night. What you see is not always what you get.

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[All images Nikon D300, ISO 100, tripod mounted. From top to bottom: (1) 12-24mm Zoom lens at 12mm (18mm in 35mm terms), 180 seconds at f/5.6; (2) 12-24mm Zoom lens at 12mm (18mm in 35mm terms), 180 seconds at f/5.6; (3) 10.5mm digital fisheye, 180 seconds at f/5.6; (4) 10.5mm digital fisheye, 903 seconds (about 15 minutes) at f/11.]

This is my first post on Trekalong.com and the Trekalong.com network. I plan to post stories about photography, sometimes in challenging locations and often at night in the darkness, and also about one of my obsessions—the Golden Gate Bridge.

Tuesday evening I gave a presentation to the Marin Photo Club about night photography, then drove into San Francisco to visit Katie Rose in the hospital. My drive took me across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I pulled off in the Presidio Bluffs area for a little night photography of my own.

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It’s easy to get to the Presidio Bluffs, just to the southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge on the San Francisco side. There’s some construction going on among the military ruins in the area, but as night locations go it doesn’t feel remote.

To get the views in this story, I followed a path to a stair up an old battery, and then climbed a ladder to the top. From there I had a straight shot at the bridge.

Compared to some of the places I shoot at night, this didn’t feel at all precarious. All the same, I was glad to have my headlamp with me.

This had been a hot day in the Bay area, so I almost didn’t carry my sweater with me. I’m glad I did, because fog rolled in through the Golden Gate, along with a chill wind off the ocean.

The fog hit the bridge, and diffused the light, creating the pools of light of different color temperatures in the atmosphere aroung the bridge.

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Mostly, these were short exposures in terms of some of the deep night images I make. I made two five minute captures, but the rest of the series were of shorter duration. I spent about an hour taking pictures, then my patience wore out, I packed up, and went off to hold my darling Katie Rose.

Briefly noted: The more distant view of the bridge is a composite of five exposures with 150X range (see the technical data below). I layered these different exposures to make a composite in Photoshop, with the bright light stars of the street lamps coming from the longest exposure. It’s interesting that the scene presented exposure values with such a wide dynamic range.

Related link: 100 Views of the Golden Gate.

[Both images: Nikon D300, 70-200mm VR zoom lens, tripod mounted. Far above: TC-20E 2X teleconverter for an effective focal length of 380mm (570mm in 35mm terms), 10 seconds at f/11 and ISO 100. Immediately above: 90mm (135mm in 35mm terms), five exposures at time durations from 300 seconds (5 minutes) to 2 seconds, f/22 and ISO 100.]