Building A Nest

Here is the image before I retouched the distracting branches.

We often have hummingbirds in our yard and this spring I noticed that they were building a nest right next to our deck.  Catching a hummingbird in flight is an exercise in patience.  They move so quickly in and out that it can present a significant challenge to timing it just right.  Having a camera that can fire off 10 frames per second is a definite advantage.  The other issue was all of the foliage and branches that were in the way.  I found it worked best to put my camera on a tripod, focus manually and then fire away whenever the bird arrived.  Other wise the autofocus would sometimes focus on the branches which were between the camera and the nest.  An effective 400mm focal length, (using a 2x extender on my 200mm lens), will blur out a lot of the intervening branches but I had to use the clone tool to get rid of a few of them.  You can see them in the version of the photo to the right and will also notice that my cloning skills are not great.  Anyway, I was still happy with the image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Beluga

A year and a half ago I went to the Vancouver Aquarium.  At places like this, you line up along the railing and just about every pair of hands is holding on to a camera.  In those circumstances, with a very restricted level of access and lacking the  ability to move around all of the photos tend to come out looking the same.  Using these restricted circumstances as a challenge to come up with a different way of expressing myself photographically I decided to focus on shape and form rather than just getting caught up with getting exactly the same photo that hundreds of other people where getting of these magnificent creatures.  The beautiful curves of the Beluga whale’s back and the contrast of it’s pearlescent white skin with the dark water produces a wonderful flowing form that echoes the liquid curve that the whale pushes around itself.  Much more interesting than a picture of the Beluga pushing it’s nose up to eat a fish out of the trainer’s hand.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Bees In Flight

As I explained in my last post I was working hard to catch bees in an interesting pose in the flowers when I decided to set a more difficult challenge for myself.  I wanted to see if I could catch a bee in flight.  I decided to start with them on the flowers because then I would have a reference point to lock my focus on.  The problem is that bees take off really quickly and if you are going to get a picture where you can see any detail you have to get really close so they fly out of frame very quickly.  There were no bees at all in my first 10 pictures because they had flown out of frame before I could react and press the button.  I began to watch them more closely and noticed that they would generally rub their front legs together in a particular way before they took off.  This little warning combined with the realization that I would have to frame the shot a little wider and depend partially on cropping to get a closeup shot meant that I got some decent shots.  It was still really difficult to keep the bees in focus because they never flew straight up from the flower so they were often flying out of the plain of focus.  I tried to deal with this by stopping down my aperture and it helped but the bees are still not really sharp.  The other thing that I really like about this photograph, as opposed to the other two below is the fact that there is such a strong sense of place.  The background, while blurred enough to not be distracting, helps us understand where we are and makes the bee seem bigger. 

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Bee spots me as he comes in for a landing.

Bees lifting off from a flower.

An Eye To The Sky

You wander around faced with an abundance of wonderful subjects, good access, and unusual wildlife so taking pretty pictures happens as long as you've got a modicum of focus and some basic skills.  However, making a good image with something to say is another thing entirely.  Finding the moment in the passing minutes is often like dipping your cup into a rushing river to find one particular drop of water.  Sometimes it happens because you are watching intently and with great purpose, sometimes it happens by accident.  

I took probably 15 images of this White-Naped Crane at the Seattle Zoo but there was one, this one, that seemed to have something to say.  His neck arches gracefully against the blurred green background, light and shadow play agains the curve of his neck, his eye seems to be searching for something lost, something that he once knew.  It's really all about patience, capturing this moment meant waiting beside the  crane exhibit until this bird showed me who he was.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Jellyfish

I wandered into the Vancouver Aquarium, not quite sure what to expect.  Very near the entrance was an entrancing exhibit of wonderfully beautiful, jellyfish. They were graceful, colourful, and elegant.  Getting a good image through the glass is not as difficult as you might think.  First of all it is very important to turn off your flash.  There were a number of people taking pictures with their phones using a flash and all that they got was a reflection of their flash in the glass.  Try and find a bit of glass that is relatively clean and get in nice and close.  This will limit the number of reflections that the sensor will pick up.  If you have a lens hood on put it right against the glass and you will get almost no reflections.  The room was dark so that helped eliminate distractions seen through the tank and I opened up to f.2.8 to throw the jellyfish in the background into a pleasant blur.  I love the way that vibrant purple provides a striking counterpoint to the ivory of the jellyfish bodies.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com