I Was Chiefly Speaking of... Flowers

My wife and I went out for a little walk yesterday and a spring walk for a photographer holds all kinds of delights.  The challenge is to find new and interesting ways to present them.  I decided that I wanted to play with large open areas of sky in my compositions To make the flowers a counterpoint to the large blocks of blue colour.  In this image I liked the contrast between the blue block of colour on the left and the dark branches on the right that still hold just the budding promise of the coming spring.  The flowers hold the middle ground in this image.  In Lightroom I increased the structure and the contrast then I took the image into Photoshop and used Content Aware Spot Healing Brush to remove three power lines.  Then I took the image into Viveza and darkened the blue sky on the left. 

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

A canopy of cherry blossoms against a blue sky.  Fuji XE-2 XF 14mm 2.8 at f/6.4 1/400 ISO 400

Reflections

The window as it looked before I converted it to black and white.

Another, very dramatica, black and white treatment.

Normally I hate black and white images with a splash of colour in them but this one really seemed to cry out for that kind of treatment.  The day was very gray when I took this picture and the image reflected in the window was almost monochromatic.  Almost, but not quite and the remaining colour was just distracting.  When I converted the image to black and white in Nik Silver Efex Pro the reflection of the Nanaimo area shipyards in the background really became more clear.  After that part of the image was the way that I wanted it I pulled the blue of the building back into the image.  I wish that I had been able to get up a little higher so that the camera was not looking up at the window; this makes the lines converge towards the top and I would like the image better if it had been square.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Wall

I was walking around downtown Vancouver recently, very much enjoying that I live on the west coast of Canada as many of my friends and family who live on the prairies were suffering through and extended winter.  I have always enjoyed construction sites as places of potential photographic interest and as I walked past this one I was struck by the contrast of colour and form.  The architect appears to have designed a new building that will preserve the facade of very much older one and the construction is growing up around this wall.  The blue green windows in the background provide a contrast with the gritty greys, browns, and reds of the old wall.  Not only are the colours working in our favour but the windows curve into the background on the left side of the frame in a very modern style when compared with the square blocky windows of the old wall.  When I got the photo home I punched up the texture, contrast, and saturation of the stone, wood and glass in Nik HDR Efex.  I wish that I had been able to frame the picture from a little further to the left so that I was taking the image from exactly 90 degrees to the wall.

-Russell Berg

Threatening Skies

The heat of the mid-afternoon sun had begun to ease as the skies in the south had darkened.  There was a tension in the air as the storm rolled up the coast.  The wind picked up and palms began to whip stiffly in the breeze.  It was coming fast and then it was upon us, the sky opened up and released its water.  The rain was warm and wet and delicious, rinsing the sweat salt from my skin, easing the warmth that pulsed underneath.

I went out into a storm on the beach in Panama to enjoy the rain and then as it ended the most amazing, dramatic skies appeared.  I rushed back to our room for my camera and headed down to the beach.  I knew I needed to underexpose to increase the drama of the sky and dramatic skys are great on their own but the picture is so much stronger if there is something with some visual interest in the foreground.  I remembered that there had been a boat down the beach so I hurried down there.  I knew I wanted to use a wide angle lens to get as much of the sky as possible but that also mean that the boat would appear smaller so I waded out to get as close as possible, (I was chest deep in the water).  I really am happy with what I got.  I feel like the photo has a strong sense of the drama of the passing storm and the boat adds some visual weight to the foreground.  I did have to lighten the boat with the Brushes tool in Aperture to make it pop a bit more.

-Russell Berg

Dragonfly

The dramatic colours of a dragonfly. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 22mm f/4.5 1/250 ISO 200

I was driving around town with my windows open and a dragonfly flew in the passenger window smacked against something hard and died.  When I got home I took looked at the poor insects and his body was still in remarkably good shape so I took it out to a very shady part of the the backyard and setup to photograph it.  I set up my flash on a stand and began to figure out my exposure.  As I learned from David Hobby (He has a very good tutorial on learning to use your flash in manual mode.  Check it out you will learn a lot.), I started with an exposure that would allow me to eliminate the ambient light so that the background would go very dark.  This meant using a relatively high shutter speed.  If you look at this image without flash it is basically black even though it was the middle of the day.  This allowed me to completely control the light in the scene.  From there it is just a matter of adjusting the power of the flash until I got the effect I wanted.  I used one Sigma EF-G 530 flash inside a shoot-through umbrella set at 1/16 power.  The umbrella gave the light a nice wrap around effect and placed a nice circular blue-white highlight in the tops of the dragonfly’s eyes.

-Russell Berg