Snake Skin, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

On Friday, I drove out to the historic Coastguard boathouse on the tip of Point Reyes to give a weekend Creative Close-Ups workshop under the auspices of Point Reyes Field Seminars. I’d unpacked and organized when a park ranger came by and told us that there was a gas leak and the building was unsafe. So we all packed up again, got in our cars, and drove through the gathering dark to the Clem Miller Environmental Education Center on the other side of Drake’s Bay.

Despite this inauspicious start, it was a great workshop with very congenial and accomplished participants—the kind of group that makes teaching the weekend workshop a pleasure, not a chore.

The Clem Miller facility has any number of interesting natural specimens around, great for close-up photography. I shot this snake skin on a light box I’d brought along to demonstrate the technique of shooting for transparency. In Photoshop, I converted the image to LAB, and inverted the Lightness channel to show the contrast of the translucent snake skin against a black background.

I’ll be giving the close-ups workshop again on Point Reyes Friday, April 29 to Sunday May 1, 2011. It’s pretty far in advance, but my workshops do tend to fill up. Here’s the registration link.

Related link: My Creative Close-Ups book on Amazon.