To Look A Bee In The Eye

Sometimes being a good photographer is just being open to the possibility of a photograph.  I was out wandering around one day, just exploring wonderful Vancouver Island and I had taken my camera with me.  I stumbled on to a beautiful spot called Moorecroft Regional Park that has a great bench sitting on a spit of land with a bay on either side and the Georgia Straight out in front of you.  It was so peaceful and beautiful, the sun was just warm enough to make the breeze a wonderful cool counterpoint and I noticed that there where bees everywhere harvesting food from the yellow flowers all around me.  When you are interested in doing macro photography many times a small point and shoot will do a wonderful job.  The small lens and small sensor combine to give a very short minimum focusing distance.  My Fuji X10 is always with me in my purse so I pulled it out and began to try and get really close.  The challenge here is to get close enough that you can get the bee to fill the frame and then to keep things in focus.  When you are this close even very small movements of the camera can throw your subject out of focus.  So I would lock focus on the flower, wait for the bee to do something interesting, try and hold very still, then press the shutter.  I did get stung once.  If you are struggling with focus you can shut down your aperture, giving you a deeper field of focus but I really wanted the other flowers in the background to blur out so that they wouldn’t be distracting.  The shot above is my favourite but I did get a couple of other interesting ones below.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

In my next post I will discuss some of the challenges of photographing bees in flight.

I especially liked the dynamic background that I had for this macro shot.

A more traditional macro insect shot.

Eyes

When I came across these two young ladies and their very beautiful, striking eyes I knew that I wanted to do a portrait of the pair of them.  I wanted that portrait to be focused, with a laser like intensity on their eyes.  I also wanted both of their eyes to be in the same image and I wanted the viewers experience of the image to be dominated by their eyes.  Taking a portrait this close up means that the lighting has to be done carefully or the reflection coming back at you will be distracting.  I could have done it with natural light, I had a window right nearby but I wanted a dramatic intensity to the light that would punch up the image.  I had discovered a very cheap way to convert an off camera flash into a pretty decent ring light by a company called DIY Lighting Kits.  It’s kind of a folding plastic contraption that captures the light from your flash and reflects it outward in a ring.  I put the camera’s lens through the middle of the ring flash, dialled in the exposure manually to darken the background and shot away.  I wanted a dramatic intense look so I upped contrast and saturation in the eyes.  You have to be careful when doing this as you can really ruin the skin tone if you take it too far.  Viveza by Nik allows you to focus your adjustments on small areas, (like the blue of their eyes), and not ruin the rest of your image.  I also added a vignette to further darken the edges of the photograph.  

For a different lighting setup of another closeup portrait check out this image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

I also did a black and white version but settled on the colour because of the striking blue grey in both their eyes that has such a different character in each of them.

The only issue that I have is that I did not adjust the model on the bottom so that she was straight on to me.  Her head is very slightly tilted to her left and I wish that I had noticed this when I did the portraits.

An Eye To The Sky

You wander around faced with an abundance of wonderful subjects, good access, and unusual wildlife so taking pretty pictures happens as long as you've got a modicum of focus and some basic skills.  However, making a good image with something to say is another thing entirely.  Finding the moment in the passing minutes is often like dipping your cup into a rushing river to find one particular drop of water.  Sometimes it happens because you are watching intently and with great purpose, sometimes it happens by accident.  

I took probably 15 images of this White-Naped Crane at the Seattle Zoo but there was one, this one, that seemed to have something to say.  His neck arches gracefully against the blurred green background, light and shadow play agains the curve of his neck, his eye seems to be searching for something lost, something that he once knew.  It's really all about patience, capturing this moment meant waiting beside the  crane exhibit until this bird showed me who he was.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Half

​The raw image that became the portrait above.

…or How to Fix A Portrait.  Wandering around firing off your camera without giving your image a lot of thought rarely turns out well but sometimes the circumstances do not allow for a great deal of thought until afterwards when you are sitting down with the image on the computer.  This week I am focusing on photos that I took during the last musical that I directed and this portrait of this young actor is one of them.  As you can see from the image to the right, the picture that came out of the camera was nothing special.  The young lady’s expression was so full of excitement and life, it carried so much anticipation that I really wanted to do something about the fact that I had completely ruined the composition by cutting off part of her face.  I often tell my young actors “if you make a mistake commit to it completely and people will think it is an artistic choice.”  So I decided to follow my own advice and instead of bemoaning the fact that I had ruined what could have been an interesting photograph I committed completely to my mistake and cut her face right in half.  There is something very compelling about that very striking single eye peering out at us from the image and I love how it turned out.  I warmed up the colour temperature and increased the saturation, especially of the greens and that brought out the green in her eyes.  I also increased the values on the black point to give a bit more drama to the lashes around her eye.  I did a little work on some minor skin blemishes because the cropping is so tight and when I was done I was very happy with the way my ‘mistake’ turned out.

-Russell Berg

Hannah

The wonderfully expressive eyes of a young actor. Canon EOS 7D EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/2.8 1/80 ISO 800

She sits on a bench in front of a window and out of the darkness a spot light hits her.  This is the beginning, the very opening moments, the audiences seems to draw in its breath with her… and she sings.  The notes are soft and delicate  but with an undercurrent of strength that allows them to drift out over the people and pull them in.  They lean towards her to be just a little closer, to hear just a little more.  The music pulses and rises and her voice hits them with a power that pushes them back in their seats and they smile and nod and wait to hear her again.

One of the actors that I had taught in high school came to me recently looking for a headshot.  She has such beautiful and expressive eyes so I wanted a photo that emphasized that.  I was using two flashes mounted in shoot-through umbrellas and I placed them so that one was directly below the other right in front of her.  My camera was poking out between the two umbrellas.  Effectively the two umbrellas became one giant light source.  I put her quite close and over-exposed a bit to get a high key look.  I liked the way that the catch-lights in the eyes have a fairly natural look.

-Russell Berg