Exploring The Dry Dock

The Nanaimo Boatyards is home to a remarkable old building that holds a dry dock for large boats to come in and get some maintenance done.  I don’t know how old it is but is there ever a lot of character in the building.  The textures and tones were so interesting and they were all the more so when I converted the image to black and white.  As I was looking at the image at full magnification when I began to prepare this post I realized that I may have had more than one image here.  There were little stories that the picture was telling throughout the building so I cropped in tight on some of the interesting areas.  Check them out below, you definitely give away some resolution but I think the results are pretty interesting.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Purple Night

I recently took a solo boat trip down to DeCourcy Island and I was hoping to make some decent nighttime images.  I had been messing around on the other side of the island where my day time scouting had determined that I was going to get the best images, (turned out I couldn’t get anything good there), and was heading back to my dinghy when I saw a boat behind this old tree.  It was very dark out, almost 10:30, so it took a little bit of work to get myself and my tripod into a position to frame the boat between the two branches.  The wind was starting to come up so the fellow on the boat was going out to check the lines coming off his stern, (the green lights extending from the back of the boat are from his head lamp shining on the water as he paddle to shore).  I did four exposures of a minute each and I felt lucky that the boat was relatively sharp in this one as it was quite windy and I was sure that the motion would show up as blur.  Using a wide angle lens, 10mm, allowed me to get close to the tree and have it dominate the frame but even though the moon was out there wasn’t enough light on it so I lit it up with my flashlight during the long exposure.  I am quite happy with the result.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

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

Sunrise Calm

Sunrise in the mist over Sooke Harbour. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 22mm f/7.1 1/500 ISO 200

There is a calm in the morning that speaks more from the still water and the mist on the horizon.  It speaks more than the quiet air and the soft light.  The beginning of the day is the beginning of all things and it is a time of stillness and potential.  The day spreads out before you with all that it may contain but in that moment, in that one moment it does not overwhelm or confound, or confuse, it is just there, waiting for us.

I slept on an old fishing boat this weekend and when I awoke this is what I saw.  It was a beautiful morning that calmed me.  I grabbed my wide angle zoom and looked for an interesting foreground.  I got down low so that the chain would grab your eye in the bottom left hand corner and pull you into the middle distance.  I loved the way that the sun backlit the edges and lines of the boat.  I underexposed the boat to emphasize the back lighting.  I also really liked the fact that their is an eagle sitting on the piling in the middle of the frame.  I did pull out my telephoto and get the eagle next.

-Russell Berg

Boat

The curve of a rowboat’s gunwhale. Canon EOS XSi EF 75-300 at 90mm f/6.3 1/200 ISO 200

Stanley walked down to the edge of the dock. He knew that the decisions had been made and that his life was going to have to change. But the things that tore at his heart where still there, the fear and the loneliness that stretched out in front of him was still there, waiting for him. Abigail skipped along the dock in front of him, her little pony-tail bouncing as she moved. She turned and smiled back at him and then looked down at the boat at the edge of the dock. "Is this the one daddy? Is this the one?"

Living in an ocean city there are m any opportunities to take pictures of some very photogenic boats. I was wandering down at the marina and I wanted a different approach, something almost abstract. The curves and lines of boats, driven as they are by their life in the water, are beautiful and interesting so I got down low and found a perspective that forced the eye to examine the lines, to follow them in their sweep and curve. We don't always have to take a photo of our whole subject to get and interesting image. In fact quite the opposite. Leaving some of the subject out of the picture or shooting it from a non-traditional point of view can end up producing a far better image.

-Russell Berg