Half

​The raw image that became the portrait above.

…or How to Fix A Portrait.  Wandering around firing off your camera without giving your image a lot of thought rarely turns out well but sometimes the circumstances do not allow for a great deal of thought until afterwards when you are sitting down with the image on the computer.  This week I am focusing on photos that I took during the last musical that I directed and this portrait of this young actor is one of them.  As you can see from the image to the right, the picture that came out of the camera was nothing special.  The young lady’s expression was so full of excitement and life, it carried so much anticipation that I really wanted to do something about the fact that I had completely ruined the composition by cutting off part of her face.  I often tell my young actors “if you make a mistake commit to it completely and people will think it is an artistic choice.”  So I decided to follow my own advice and instead of bemoaning the fact that I had ruined what could have been an interesting photograph I committed completely to my mistake and cut her face right in half.  There is something very compelling about that very striking single eye peering out at us from the image and I love how it turned out.  I warmed up the colour temperature and increased the saturation, especially of the greens and that brought out the green in her eyes.  I also increased the values on the black point to give a bit more drama to the lashes around her eye.  I did a little work on some minor skin blemishes because the cropping is so tight and when I was done I was very happy with the way my ‘mistake’ turned out.

-Russell Berg

Focus

Backstage there is a whirling tornado of exhaustion, outrageous energy, and frayed nerves.  Some of them look as though they are about to come apart at the seams, some of them look as though they are about to throw up.  For many of them it is the first time and they will step out on to the boards and the light will hit them and three-hundred pairs of eyes will watch.  There are always the questions, do I know it well enough? will I hit that high G? can I time my jump just right? But in the middle of it all these two find the calm, gentle centre of themselves and they know.  They know that they are ready, they know can sing like angels and dance like demons, they know because they see it there in the other’s eyes.

I direct theatre at the school where I teach and last year as we were about to go on stage for the opening night of our big musical I caught sight of these two backstage.  They are sisters and they were quietly speaking to each other, foreheads touching, a look of intense focus and concentration on each of their eyes.  I knew I wanted the image to include both of them so I snapped off a shot over the should of one and into the eyes of the other.  I knew one image wouldn’t tell the whole story though so I slid around to the other side and took a similar image of the other sister.  Both of the girls have very striking blonde hair so I knew that I wanted a high key image so I gave it that kind of treatment in Nik Silver Efex Pro and then toned down the effect in hair of the girl on the right so that I could get back the detail.  The images work well together, producing a mirror image study of concentration and focus.

-Russell Berg

For more portraits of young actors check here, here, and here.​

That Peculiar Silence

A headshot that I took of an intense young actor with remarkable blue eyes. Canon EOS 7D 50mm f/1.4 at f/5.6 1/200 ISO 400The young actor steps into the light.  She feels the warmth of it touch her cheeks, she feels the boards under her feet, she hears that peculiar silence of 200 pairs of eyes watching her, and she feels their anticipation.  The theatre is old and battered, a thousand different actors have walked these same boards and felt these same things.  She can feel their eyes watching her too.  She takes two steps to the right, downstage centre right, and breathes deep and slow.  It is time... to tell her story.

I teach theatre and I always take headshots of my actors as we prepare to perform.  I knew that I wanted to do something to accentuate the red hair and blue eye of this young lady.  I felt like putting her in a pose that was looking up at me, partially through her hair would draw the viewers eye in dramatically.  I was using two off camera flashes using Cactus V4 radio triggers to light her.  The key, at camera right, was in a shoot-through umbrella and was at a slightly higher power than the one at camera left.  I wanted fairly even light but this did produce a small amount of shadow.  Both lights were set low enough and the background was far enough back so that it went to full black.  I also made a slight increase to the saturation levels of her eyes and hair in Aperture.

-Russell Berg

Below is the picture I took just before the image above.  I feel like the two of them tell a bit of a story.