Jellyfish

I wandered into the Vancouver Aquarium, not quite sure what to expect.  Very near the entrance was an entrancing exhibit of wonderfully beautiful, jellyfish. They were graceful, colourful, and elegant.  Getting a good image through the glass is not as difficult as you might think.  First of all it is very important to turn off your flash.  There were a number of people taking pictures with their phones using a flash and all that they got was a reflection of their flash in the glass.  Try and find a bit of glass that is relatively clean and get in nice and close.  This will limit the number of reflections that the sensor will pick up.  If you have a lens hood on put it right against the glass and you will get almost no reflections.  The room was dark so that helped eliminate distractions seen through the tank and I opened up to f.2.8 to throw the jellyfish in the background into a pleasant blur.  I love the way that vibrant purple provides a striking counterpoint to the ivory of the jellyfish bodies.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Dark Arch

She stands in the corner, waiting with her children.  The darkness of the twilight is beginning to press down upon them and although it is still very warm outside a chill runs up her back and she pulls the children a little closer.  Her man is out on the battlements, he is not a soldier, he is a tailor, but there he is, when the pirates come everyone is a soldier and she wonders if the night will leave her a widow.  The wind starts to pick up and she can hear the flags start to snap in the breeze.  The sound is distinct, too loud, and then she realizes that it is no longer the flags she is hearing but the crack of muskets.  The battle has begun.

Establishing mood and and emotional tone within an image can be a tenuous thing that is difficult to grab in the moment in which the image is taken.  Often this is easier to manage in post as the light and circumstances of the shot may not suit the story that you are trying to tell with the image.  This picture was taken right around midday, on a blazing hot day but my head was full of stories of marauding pirates and guardian priests as we walked around Casco Viejo in Panama City.  I wanted an image that carried with it the fear and ominous portent of an approaching invading force.  I was standing inside rock walls that had witnessed the terror and confusion of a people under attack and I wanted to be able to look up into the image and feel those emotions.  I pulled the image into Nik Silver Efex Pro and started playing with some extreme changes to contrast and texture, then I started to work on the undersides and lower levels of the rock wall to produce a dark and heavy visual weight to the image.  The perspective of the very wide angle lens puts you right at the base of the wall looking high up into history.

-Russell Berg

Mountain Ridge

Dramatic Rocky Mountain ridge near Banff, AB. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 12mm f/11 1/320 ISO 100

The great rocks reach out and pull us in even while they dominate our senses and produce in us a kind of fear tinged with awe.  We stand before them and we know that our mortality is a certain thing and yet our will to live, to experience them, just to stand and see them is so strong. 

Finding a way to present a photograph of a mountain that is not tired and cliche can be a challenge.  For landscape photographers they present an irresistible draw so finding a way to stand out from the millions of mountain photographs is difficult.  When I saw this mountain ridge near Banff on a sunny afternoon I knew that I wanted a very high contrast black and white image with an almost black sky and a black foreground.  I underexposed by one stop to darken the sky and took the image.   I used a very wide angle, 12mm, to allow the range to spread out through the frame, giving the ridge lots of length instead of the traditional towering height that mountains often get in landscape photography.  The image is made more dynamic by the strong visual weight on the left of the photograph and it pulls your eye to the right as the ridge diminishes into the distance.  I brought the image into Nik Silver Efex Pro and applied a high contrast under-exeposed filter to it.  This produced the black skies and the silver mountains that appear almost to float.  Below is the unprocessed colour version of the photograph and you can see how much more dramatic, how much more powerful the image is in black and white.

-Russell Berg

Below is a more tradition composition of the same mountain with it rising higher in the frame.  I feel that the first image with it’s space to breathe and the way it pulls your eye through the frame is a much more powerful photograph.

Mountains rising out of the plain near Banff. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 22mm f/10 11/250 ISO 100

Open Rest

Dramatic prairie sky's darken as a storm breaks over a field of wheat. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm f/9 1/60 ISO 100

My wheels hum down the open highway as the wide prairie spaces open up in front of me.  This place has been called empty but for me it is not empty, it is open.  There is a beauty in the openness that invites you to examine yourself rather than overwhelm you with the ‘other’ that surrounds you.  There is space to breath and think.  The prairies are like the rest between the notes, the pause in the well crafted sentence, the negative space that defines the image.  They are the place where we can understand the rest of our lives because for the moment we can consider the rest of our lives with spaces for the thoughts to breath.

One more from my trip to the prairies.  I went out for a bike ride in the early morning and as I got closer to home the wind started to whip up and the sky started to darken in the south.  I love a dramatic prairie sky over a sunlit wheat field and I went back out with my car to find the right angle under the right sky.  I got this image but I knew that I had to do some work on it.  The sensor on my 7D does not have the dynamic range to cover the variation in light and darkness in the image.  I exposed for the highlights and then went to work on the image in Aperture.  I really liked the ‘U’ shaped ring of dramatic clouds so I emphasized this  by brushing in more contrast to the edges of the ‘U’ where they bordered the softer clouds.  I then darkened the softer clouds in the middle of the frame near the horizon line.  Next was the wheat.  I painted in light with the dodge tool in Aperture and then added saturation to the yellow-greens of the wheat.  I was quite happy with the drama that resulted.

-Russell Berg  

Death

A piece of decaying drift wood on the shores of the Juan de Fuca Strait. Canon XSi EF 50mm at f/1.4 1/4000 ISO 200 -1 ev

I was hiking along the Juan de Fuca strait with my daughter and we had camped for the night when I came upon this piece of driftwood.  The texture of the wood as it had decayed in such a remarkable pattern was what interested me and I wanted a photograph that pulled your eye in to that.  I chose my fast 50mm and opened it right up to f/1.4 to created a very small plane of focus.  I got what I wanted but I knew that I would want to do more when I got the image back home.   I opened it up in Nik Silver Efex Pro and converted it to black and white and applied a vignette to completely black out the distracting background.  Not only does this force the eye to focus on the central subject but it also helps to set the mood of the photo.

-Russell Berg