Blue Lake

A cold mountain lake near Banff. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 16mm f/9 1/160 ISO 100

She stands in the water knee deep and alone, staring off into a landscape that is overwhelming in its beauty.  The cold is seeping into her skin, slowing her blood and making her bones ache.  It is the kind of cold that takes your breath away, the kind of cold that slows movement at your joints and gives you a headache.  Tomorrow morning, before the mists have been burned away by the rising sun she will swim this lake.

My daughter raced in a triathlon in Banff and this was the lake where the swim portion of the course place in.  The lake was glacier fed and very cold so I wanted to produce an image that expressed how cold the lake was.  First I cropped the image down to produce a more symmetrical tree line at both edges of the frame.  I wanted the highest point of the tree lines to be very near the edge of the frame so both sides of the image pull down and in towards the mountain in the background.  I also adjusted the crop in the foreground to place the first rock in the very bottom right corner of the frame.  These almost completely black shapes pull your eye into the image from the bottom right an out to the mountain in the background.  The image of the mountain happens at the intersection of three curves all of which pull your eye in to the centre.  This was taken on a bright sunny day so to get the cold feeling I converted to black and white in  Nik Silver Efex Pro and then reduced the exposure to darken it and added a cross process in Aperture that introduced the blue tint.

-Russell Berg

A Cruel Beauty

A broken piece of ice juts up into the sunset on a frozen prairie lake. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 at 20mm f/11 1/1000 ISO 400The cold hits your face like a physical force.  You gasp and breathe in and the temperature of the air assaults your lungs.  You take a couple of quick halting breaths and you begin to find your equilibrium.  You are of course dressed for it but the cold is a force in nature that is relentless and inexorable.  It finds the gaps in your clothing and begins to steal the heat away from you.  You breathe deep now and find that your growing accustomed to the discomfort of the air in your lungs and you exhale in a cloud of water vapour in front of your face.  Some of it begins to cling to your eyelashes and soon there will be small ice crystals hanging from each one.  Sometimes, it is difficult to open your eyes all the way.  You begin to walk and the polyester fabric of your jacket crinkles and rustles as you force it to move from it's cold stiffened position.  You glance at the thermometer as you walk past the corner of the house. -37 degrees celsius.

It wasn't that cold when I took this picture, (maybe -15 or -20), but a I wanted a photograph that expressed some of the cruel beauty of our winters in Canada.  The ice on this lake had shifted and cracked on to itself and pushed upwards into the air.  It formed a wonderful counterpoint to the sunset as it fell across the lake.  You have to be careful when backlighting a subject that it doesn't go really dark but luckily, in this case, the ice was translucent enough to let enough light through to preserve the detail in it's form.  There were quite a few specks of dirt in the ice so I cloned them out in Aperture.

-Russell Berg

Ice and Sky

Fuji X10 7mm f9 at 1/1000 ISO 800 The subtlety of the colours on an ice-covered, winter lake is amazing.

During the holidays my family and I went back to the prairies to spend time with family.  Every time I go back I am struck by the skys.  I live now in the mountains and the forest and we are so often closed in from the sky.  There is something important and vital about being able to be alone with yourself in the middle of a giant sky that reaches down to the horizon on every side of you.  It gives you a sense of perspective that is lacking in the forest or in the shadow of a mountain. 

I am really enjoying my new camera.  The Fuji X10 has a leaf shutter so it is able to synch with the flash very reliably up to 1/1000 of a second and that means I can take pictures that are otherwise impossible.  In the photo above I was down on the ice pointing my camera directly into the sinking sun.  In normal circumstances that requires an exposure that would have thrown the ice and snow into deep shadow.  Either that or I allow the sun to blow out.  With the X10 I can keep my shutter speed high to keep detail in the sunset and use the flash to expose the snow and ice effectively.  I loved the geometric patterns in the ice and so I laid my flash down on the ice to my left and allowed the light to skitter across the ice and bounce off the snow bank on the left.  I really liked the way that it turned out.

-Russell Berg

Fuji X10 7mm f11 at 1/680 ISO 200 I love the way playing with perspective and a wide angle lens can make this relatively small formation seem much larger.