Holding Tight

The old girl wallows a bit in heavy seas, the bilge pumps too slowly, and the starter needs a tap of the hammer to get it going but she has plied the waters of the inside passage for 6 decades, hauled halibut, herring, crab, and prawns, and brought her crew home safely every time.  At times the water, has come over the bow, the engine has refused to sputter to life, the electrical systems have all gone dark but every time, with the help, urging, and cursing of her crew she has eventually roared to life and brought them safely home.  Now she rests, the water laps gently agains the wooden hull in this protected passage and she holds tightly to the safety of the dock.

I was floating down Newcastle Passage heading back to my slip when I saw this old boat.  I knew that it would provide for an interesting subject but there were a few challenges.  There was a mess of distracting and uninteresting colours and a very busy background.  The first step was to convert to black and white.  That instantly improved the image but I still wasn’t getting the texture and the age of the vessel.  I have tried this kind of thing in Silver Efex Pro but Nik has another plugin called HDR Efex that really pulls the texture out of an image in an interesting way.  The peeling paint, the dents and the age of the boat really came forward.  Next I had to deal with the background.  I added control points all over the background in each different tonal area that allowed me to darken the background and separate the boat from it.  It’s better but still not completely successful.  The fact that I am using a telephoto lens here works against me being able to separate the boat from the background as telephotos tend to compress your image.  The next thing that I wanted to do was to enhance and brighten the silvery smooth water.  I felt like this would provide an interesting contrast to the battered boat so I brightened the water and increased the contrast.  If there is one thing that I am still unhappy with it is that I wish there where a little more breathing space on either end of the boat inside the frame.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

A Wooden Heart

A small part of a large log that I found on the beach of the Juan de Fuca Trail. Canon EOS XSi EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.4 1/2000 ISO 200My hand runs along the softly weathered cracks, this giant of the forest has somehow come to rest on the rocky shore of the Juan de Fuca Strait.  There is a silver light that seems to glow from deep within.  It is as though somewhere deep deep inside is a wooden heart that still beats and gives the log a vitality that makes it shine in the dying light of a summer sunset.  Years of rocks and waves have pounded the surface so smooth that my hand wants to run along the surface, to find the secret of all those years, to discover a thing through which the wine of life pumped so strongly that it reached towards the very heavens and yet... it fell.

My daughter and I walked the Juan de Fuca Trail a few years ago and we had an absolutely wonderful time together.  One night on Chin Beach, after we had set up camp I discovered a very large log with a huge weathered stump attached.  The sun was going down and it was lit beautifully.  I pulled out my fast 50 because I knew that I wanted to play with depth of field on this amazing piece of wood.  I kep my aperture wide open and the light was low enough to manage all that light giving me some wonderfully flowing, almost water-like backgrounds.

-Rusell Berg

Life Still Courses

Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85 f/4-5.6 at 85mm f/11 1/250 ISO 100 This older lady wandered into view on the Victoria Breakwater and I just had to have a picture of her amazing face.

There is a woman who walks down the pier.  She does so slowly and with a deliberation forced on her by the pain in her joints and the weakness in her knees.  This is not the tragic story of a dancer whose knees gave out on her or a singer who lost it all.  She was not a dancer or a singer, she did not once command the attention of great audiences.  She raised a family, she washed clothes, she made meals and now her body betrays her.  Her husband has been dead many years and even though her step is slow and her heart is many times heavy she still moves with purpose and will.  Life still courses in her veins.  She looks up to see the sails of the boat in the distance fill with wind and snap and surge and she smiles.

I was walking with my daughter on the Victoria Breakwater and on our way back we decided to walk on the quarried stone below instead of on the walkway proper.  It was a beautiful sunny day and there were several scuba divers heading out.  As we were walking I saw an older lady approaching us on the walkway above.  I knew that the concrete was going to be in the frame so I quickly decided to make it a design element, using it to bisect the frame diagonally.  I also had to move quickly because she was going to see me soon and I didn't want her expression to change if she saw me.  Her face had an amazing quality in it with so many wonderful stories in the lines, I wish I could have talked to her.

-Russell Berg

Life In The Lines

A delightful old man with a lot of life drawn into the lines of his face. Canon 7D, EFS 50mm 1.4 at f2.8 1/60, ISO 400A Perfect Photographic Morning Part 3

After I had climbed down off of the scaffolding, ignoring a few strange stares, (see previous post), I headed towards the mall because I wanted to cut through to go to a waffle restaurant that I wanted to have breakfast in.  I paused for a moment, and a thought occurred to me, “nothing interesting ever happened in a mall, this morning is about ‘interesting.’”  I kept walking, heading around the block.  I had walked about 15 steps and I looked to my left and there I saw a most interesting face, I thought, man I would like to photograph him, so I screwed up my courage, walked in and asked him if he would mind if I took some pictures of him.  He laughed, asked if these pictures were going in Penthouse.  I took some photos as she cut his hair moving around them but my favourite image was this one, he was laughing most of the time but I love the slightly wry smile that he is giving here, the heavily lidded eyes that have seen so much of life. I like the old newspaper clippings and old photos taped on to the mirror and the busy countertop.  How much more interesting this was than walking past the Gap.

-Russell Berg