Laundry Art

Good images happen when you walk around with your camera.  I was walking with friends around downton Seattle and as we wandered past an alley I happened to look up and this is what I saw.  I believe, although I am not sure, that it was an urban art installation.  They way that the wires crossed back and forth from all different levels, the fact that every piece of laundry was white, it all spoke to and intentional piece of art.  I thought it was beautiful and your experience of it changed as you walked underneath and the lines and placement of the pieces changed as my perspective changed.  I knew that I wanted a photograph of it but it presented a challenging exposure situation.  I was standing in deep shadow with dark shadows falling on parts of both walls and a bright blue sky right behind the main subject.  I didn’t want the walls to go black because the sense of context that they give is really important so I took my initial reading using spot metering off of one of the shirts and then underexposed by one stop.  I wasn’t concerned about preserving detail in the sky because there was none, but I didn’t want the shirts to blow out the highlights.  Luckily the shirts were all in shadow so they weren’t too hot, exposure wise.  By going -1 on the exposure the walls were very dark in my original image but there was enough dynamic range in the file to pull the detail out in post processing.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Swallowing The Chairs

Andrew turned the corner and stopped, it was for him a very familiar spot, a place where he came every day to catch the bus.  In fact he came here so often to wait for the bus that he had made his own bus stop bench by bringing over three lawn chairs that he had stolen from Wilson’s house.  He had, at first taken one chair and brought it there but it seemed out of place, unbalanced and so he brought another, and another until he had what amounted to a bus stop bench where another person could sit down without the social awkwardness that comes from sitting right next to a stranger.  Andrew doubted that Wilson had ever even noticed that the chairs were gone; his yard was like a great resting place for the rusting, unused, discards of an entire city.  There was a sense of finality about this moment though.  He wasn’t just waiting for a bus, he was waiting for the bus.  The bus which would turn the corner, travel down Nicol street and stop around the corner from the Salvation Army Men’s Shelter and stop, it would continue on its route circling the south end of the city until it travelled past Andrew’s improvised bus stop bench once again.  This time though, Andrew would not be on it, he was leaving and he didn’t expect he would return.

One morning I was driving around the south downtown area of Nanaimo looking for good images.  I spent a good part of the day looking around for images and two of my best are in the posts here and here.  As I turned a corner I noticed a very large abandoned lot that was completely overgrown.  Living in a temperate rainforest means that it doesn’t take long for nature to reclaim its primacy over the sculpted lawns and neat curbstones.  Someone had left three lawn chairs sitting right at the corner of the intersection and the ivy and the grasses had grown through, around, and over them.  There was an interesting story here and I wanted an image that helped to start the story.  When I pulled the image  into Aperture I knew I wanted it in black and white and as I started to play with it in Nik Silver Efex Pro I decided to create a bit of an area of mystery and depth so I darkened the triangle in the upper right area of the image until it was almost black.  I wanted to create the perception that something could be coming out of the forest behind you, if you ever sat down in those chairs.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Cobbles

Dramatic cobblestone street in the older part of Portland. Canon EOS XSi EF 17-85mm at 17mm f/4.5 1/2000 ISO 800

I first noticed the fluttering piece of silk as I stepped out of my apartment and on to the sidewalk.  It was caught in the grate around a tree and was rippling a little in the light morning breeze.  I looked up the street and down the other side, there was a woman in the distance.  I glanced down again at what I now saw was a luxurious turquoise silk scarf with a fringe on the ends.  I bent down for the scarf to untangle it from the grate and ran towards the woman.  She had turned the corner ahead of me and as I rounded the corner I found myself on a completely empty street.  I stopped short, confused; in my run I had gotten quite close to her before she turned the corner but now she was just… gone.

I was walking around downtown Portland, which has beautiful old architecture and wonderful streets.  I was crossing the street above and I was struck by the beauty I saw.  The cobbles had the shine of the morning dew and the glistening rails pulled my eye off along the shallow curve deep into the frame.  I wanted to emphasize the cobbles so I laid down on the street and got the camera on the ground, the wide angle emphasized the size and shape of the stones.  The image cried out for a black and white treatment and with Nik Silver Efex I brought up the texture of the bricks and the silver sheen on the tracks.

-Russell Berg 

Vancouver

A skyline view of Vancouver from the harbour. Canon EOS XSi EF 17-85mm at 17mm f/22 1/90 ISO 200

A Moving Painting

A pedicab parking lot hidden amongst graffiti covered walls. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85mm at 66mm f/8 1/100 ISO 100

The splash of colour and shape is filled with movement and energy.  The images move so much it seems to belie the fact that they are painted on walls.  Monsters, and fairy’s, letters and words dance around the parking lot and every time I look I see more. 

I am always looking for interesting graffiti to photography but it is more interesting with something in the foreground.  I was driving around Victoria when I caught a bright flash of colour out of the corner of my eye.  I turned around and came back to see a very interesting pedicab parking lot.  The whole area was covered in graffiti.  I wanted an image that made the eye work a little to discover what the place was so I positioned myself to hide the front half of one pedicab and the back half of the other.  In the riot of colour and shape the viewer gets to discover what the image is all about and that makes the experience richer.

-Russell Berg