The wind, the rain, and the ocean sometimes do a wonderful job to produce some very interesting erosion patterns in the driftwood. This large stump had been hollowed out form the middle. I squeezed myself into the middle of this stump with my wide angle lens to get the feeling of a dragon coiled around me. I loved the way that the root in the middle looked like a dragon’s head (1) that was looking out to the sky. I wanted to give the dragon something to look at so I brightened the sky so that it would appear as though the dragon was looking out to the sunset (2). There were going to be a couple of issues with the photograph though. I wanted to keep everything in focus from the wood 10 cm in front of my lens (3) to the island 5km away on the horizon (4). A wide angle lens will naturally help keep more of the frame in focus but I also stopped down my aperture to f/10. The second issue was the huge dynamic range that I was dealing with. The sky and the background was very bright and the foreground was in deep shadow. No one exposure could take in that variation in brightness, not without some manipulation. If I had exposed for the shadowy logs, the sky would be too bright, If I exposed for the sky the logs would be black. I shot a medium exposure and that leaned towards the highlights and took it in to Nik HDR. That program does some serious digital voodoo and pulled the detail out of the logs.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

A river of wood flows through the frame. Canon EOS XSi EF 50mm at f/4 1/3000 ISO 200

There is a river that runs through the wood. The water is quiet and the eddy’s move slowly but the water speaks deep truths in the warm silence of a sunny evening. The water is locked in the grain of the wood and the stillness that is there runs deep beneath the surface. I run my hands over the wood and I can feel the age that rests there.

I found this rather large and impressive stump on a remote beach on the Juan de Fuca trail and I spent much of the evening photographing it. The texture of the wood, the silvery colour, the way that the grain had been exposed in flowing cracks that seemed to live and breath were all very compelling to me. This was a remarkable piece of wood and it was very special to be able to photograph it. There were several places where the structure and grain of the wood seemed to flow like water and I wanted to photograph it with that kind of feeling to it. I wanted an isolating depth of field but one that was open enough to allow the viewer to get a good look at the grain so I settled on f/4.

-Russell Berg

Dragon's Watch

A River In The Wood