Sometimes Red...

Sometimes red is just red and sometimes it is blood and passion and loyalty.  Sometimes red is the heat of anger, the all encompassing compulsion of love, the binding rage of jealousy.  But sometimes red… is just red.

One fall I was walking around taking photos of the beautiful foliage and on impulse I picked up one leaf that I thought was particularly beautiful and I carried it around all over town taking pictures of it in different circumstances.  (See another example of a portrait of this leaf here.)  The leaf had such a wonderful colour and vein structure that I wanted an image that would really emphasize these two characteristics so I looked for a place where I could place it so that it would appear alone against the backdrop of the high sky.  I twisted the stem around a small branch that was hanging down above me, composed so that you couldn’t see any other branches and took the picture underexposing a little.  I pumped up the saturation levels a little and increased the contrast to give the red some real punch.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Space in His Head

Lentzer walked slowly through the park.  He had been this way before, many times.  It was the place he went when his headed needed space to breathe, when the confusion that circled inside of him now would often begin to untangle itself.  Not today.  The tangled knots remained and his head remained a claustrophobic space; a small closed room on hot summer day.  His thoughts could not get space to breathe.  He kicked through the carpet of fallen leaves on the grass and moved on maybe he needed to sit by the stream.

The vibrant colours of the fallen autumn leaves presented a compelling study in colour.  The leaves had fallen out of a single maple tree and they were scattered around.  I knew that I wanted a photograph that had a field of view that was completely dominated by this red orange colour so I had to move myself around to get a perspective that had nothing in the background.  Sometimes we photographers get lazy when we say things like “there was nothing I could do about it, that power pole was in the frame.”  We decide what is in the frame, we decide where we are standing, what is in focus, what lens to use, and where we point the camera.  If we aren’t happy with what is in the frame then we need to move, crop, change lens, or change aperture.  The photograph that we take is all of ours and everything in it is there because we have chosen to let it remain there.

-Russell Berg

Death of A Leaf

A leaf dies slowly on the tree, it’s decay an amazing mixture of colour and form. Fuji X10 at 7mm f/2 1/1000 ISO 400

I continued wandering through Beban Park and saw this leaf just barely clinging to the tree and dying in such a beautiful display.  I loved the way that the colour and form, especially the negative space formed by the parts of the leaf that had already decayed to be especially interesting.  The light was so bright, however, that it was hard to distinguish the background from the foreground when I took the photo and I knew that this picture had a lot of potential but that it was going to require some work in post.  After importing the image into Aperture I increased the saturation slightly and started to play with ways to pull the leaf off of the background.  I increased the definition and this helped to make the edges more distinct but it still needed more so I burned in the photo on the edges and the parts of the background that showed through the holes in the leaf to darken it.  This got me part of the way there but the colours were still so bright on the edges so I applied a gamma vignette that desaturated and darkened the edges some more.  I applied a little more burn in to the holes in the leaf and it was there.  The treatment added a lot of depth to the image and allowed this wonderful leaf to stand out from the background.

-Russell Berg

Orange Leaves

Orange leaves filter the morning light. Fuji X10 at 14mm f/5.6 1/85 ISO 200

The end of things is a beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking time.  We stand in the satisfied exhaustion of a job well done and we see the beautiful thing that we have made and we know that for now it is ending. But the work that we have done has had a lasting and worthwhile impact.  That is what fall is like for me.  It is so beautiful but it is a kind of death, an ending.

I went out last weekend on Saturday morning because the sunlight was so beautiful and the colours of the autumn leaves were so spectacular.  I wanted to be able to catch the vivid display while the beautiful morning light was so nice.  I found some beautiful trees in Beban Park in Nanaimo and looked for an interesting way to photograph them. The morning light was still not too strong but it supplied just the right amount of light for the slightly translucent leaves as they stood out against the sky. I took a couple of photos with the leaves at dead centre but I looked for a contrast in colour and texture so I shifted to the side and composed the frame to include the gnarled branches of the old maple.  The branches were far enough back to go nicely out of focus so as not to distract from the leaves but also to provide contrast and context.

-Russell Berg

To Look Them in The Eye

Looking up into the red leaves at the coming winter. Canon XSi EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.4 1/1000 ISO 200

I am wondering where all those years have gone.  Those years where my little ones tore off through the park, a trail of dry leaves fluttering behind them.  Those years where they returned to me so excited and at having found a snake, or a wood bug, or a rock.  Those years where I squatted to look them in the eye.  I miss having to get down on the ground to look them in the eye.  Instead I lean here against this tree and the remnants of my children's youth flutter to the ground next to my feet.

I was wandering around in fall really looking for photos of single leaves on the ground when I looked up.  I was really attracted by the mass of colour and the contrast of the brown branches and tree trunk.  I love being able to play with the way that the eye moves within a photograph so I composed a shot that pulls your eye upward from the out of focus trunk at the bottom up through the clearly defined shape and form of the leaves to the amorphous mass of colour at the top.  The shallow depth of field of my fast 50 made the photograph possible.  The imposition of an area of focus within the photograph gives your eye somewhere to travel.

-Russell Berg