The Plaka: A Photo Essay Part 1

I had dropped my bags grabbed some supper and my wide angle lens and went to explore how this area of Athens was going to photograph. I had walked down a fairly commercial street filled with American stores and I came smack up against this beauty. When a building starts to fall down the Athenians put these upper railings/deflector walls I think to prevent the pedestrians below from getting clunked on the head. It was a building of such character and my eye got pulled down the alley to the right to continue my exploration.

Building A Nest

Here is the image before I retouched the distracting branches.

We often have hummingbirds in our yard and this spring I noticed that they were building a nest right next to our deck.  Catching a hummingbird in flight is an exercise in patience.  They move so quickly in and out that it can present a significant challenge to timing it just right.  Having a camera that can fire off 10 frames per second is a definite advantage.  The other issue was all of the foliage and branches that were in the way.  I found it worked best to put my camera on a tripod, focus manually and then fire away whenever the bird arrived.  Other wise the autofocus would sometimes focus on the branches which were between the camera and the nest.  An effective 400mm focal length, (using a 2x extender on my 200mm lens), will blur out a lot of the intervening branches but I had to use the clone tool to get rid of a few of them.  You can see them in the version of the photo to the right and will also notice that my cloning skills are not great.  Anyway, I was still happy with the image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Casco Viejo

My wife and I were wandering through the old city of Casco Viejo in Panama City and my eye was caught by this old building.  I think the thing that first struck me was the ragged outline of the roof against the skyline.  The overhanging roofs of the neighbouring buildings help to build the sense of compression that the wide angle lens establishes by pulling in the edges of the frame.  After I took the image I pulled it in to Nik HDR Efex Pro.  HDR Efex Pro is a piece of software that is intended to produce HDR like images from a single RAW frame without having to take 3 or more frames.  (If you are interested in HDR check out this tutorial.)  I hadn’t really used HDR Efex before and I was impressed with the results of some of the more subtle treatments.  If pulled out the detail in the overhanging eaves of the neighbouring buildings and and added real punch to the texture of the image.  Below is the image without the HDR Efex treatment.

-Russell Berg

Painting The City

A Victoria building covered in vibrant graffiti art. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85 at 21mm f/14 1/50 ISO 400

he back of a building, hidden from view reveals an incredible trove of detailed graffiti. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85 at 44mm f/14 1/80 ISO 400