Goodbye Love

Mark: Mimi still loves Roger.  Is Roger really jealous or afraid that Mimi's weak

Roger: Mimi did look pale

Mark: Mimi's gotten thin.  Mimi's running out of time. Roger's running out the door--

Roger: No more! Oh no! I've gotta go.

Mark: Hey! For someone who's always been let down who's heading out of town?

Roger:  For someone who longs for a community of his own, who's with his camera, alone?  I'll call. I hate the fall.  (Mimi enters) You heard?

Mimi:  Every word. You don't want baggage without lifetime guarantees. You don't want to watch me die?  I just came to say goodbye love, goodbye love

If you'd like to see how part of the scene turned out check it out here.  James Dean as Roger, Kody Dennison as Mark, and Micalla Wallace as Mimi

If you would like to see more portraits that I have done of my actors check here, here, here, and here

My theatre club did a production of RENT this year and as we cast the show I wanted a Mimi that was able to express a fragility and vulnerability beneath a thin crust of self-confidence.  This young actor quickly found this in her work with the character and I feel like this photograph captures that.  Mimi is watching from the background as Roger, the man she is in love with, explains to his friend why he can’t be around her, why he can’t watch her die. (Mimi has AIDS.)  Mimi is trapped by her health, trapped by her relationship with Roger, trapped by her addictions, and trapped by her poverty.  As she enters the stage near the end of the musical she sees the last of her hope whither up and float away in the autumn wind.  We put her at the back of the stage to hear Roger’s last words about her where the metaphorical bars of her existence are made real in the bars of the scaffolding.  Probably, there were very few people in the audience who saw her standing there in the background but for me this image, and the character that this actor brings to it, encapsulates everything about who Mimi is.  I shot it in very low light so it was very grainy and unattractive as a colour image so I imported it into Silver Efex Pro and as a grainy B&W it had exactly the kind of gritty intensity that fit the scene.

-Russell Berg

Math Hurts

Sometimes math brings despair to the surface. Fuji X10 at f/6.4 1/20 ISO 400

I teach math now but I know how this feels.  When I was in high school I hated math and I was not really any good at it, not until grade 12 anyway.  Then I met Mr. Geddes.  Mr. Geddes was not your typical “Dead Poets Society” kind of teacher.  He was strict and demanding but I connected with him in a way that I hadn’t with any of my other Math teachers.  He helped me to see that there was a beauty and a truth in mathematics that could not be replicated anywhere else.  My parents still laugh when I talk about teaching math, they only remember all of those long and disappointing parent-teacher interviews with my former math teachers, but I think that that experience has helped to make me a better teacher.  One who understands how bone-crushingly confusing it can be to get your head around it all.

I had a student this year who loved art but hated math.  She would come to class with the most amazing drawings and sketches and one day she drew a skeleton in ink on her hand.  It was absolutely remarkable that her love of art and hatred of math would come to the surface in one wonderful moment so I took out my little X10 and shot a couple of photographs of her.  I processed the image into the dark tones and with greater contrast to heighten the mood and to pull the skeleton drawing up off her hand.  I then added a vignette to the edges to help remove distracting details and tighten the focus on to my subject.

-Russell Berg