Building A Nest

Here is the image before I retouched the distracting branches.

We often have hummingbirds in our yard and this spring I noticed that they were building a nest right next to our deck.  Catching a hummingbird in flight is an exercise in patience.  They move so quickly in and out that it can present a significant challenge to timing it just right.  Having a camera that can fire off 10 frames per second is a definite advantage.  The other issue was all of the foliage and branches that were in the way.  I found it worked best to put my camera on a tripod, focus manually and then fire away whenever the bird arrived.  Other wise the autofocus would sometimes focus on the branches which were between the camera and the nest.  An effective 400mm focal length, (using a 2x extender on my 200mm lens), will blur out a lot of the intervening branches but I had to use the clone tool to get rid of a few of them.  You can see them in the version of the photo to the right and will also notice that my cloning skills are not great.  Anyway, I was still happy with the image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

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

Purple Tracks

During the summer time we were in Vernon for a weekend and I had seen an old barn with some character that I wanted to photograph at sunset.  The nearby hills cast the barn into shadow so I kept driving around looking for an interesting subject.  The light is everything.  If I had taken this picture at 2 in the afternoon I would have gotten washed out greens, a flat boring railroad track and some very grey rocks.  The light cutting down through all of that horizon in the evening makes the green and yellow come together in a fiery gold, the low slanting light hits the tracks and produces a reflection that pulls your eye into the photo.  The tracks also put the rocks into a light shadow allowing them to display their purple-blue colour.  When photographers go out at sunset or sunrise good things happen.

-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

Flowers In The Mist

A dreamy purple flower in the morning mist. Canon EOS XSi EF 70-300mm at 300mm f/5.6 1/350 ISO 800 −1ev

I found this flower after wandering around the edges of a prairie slough on an early summer morning.  I caught a glimpse of it through the mass of green reeds and grasses.  I couldn’t get very close to it without getting wet but I was drawn by the contrast in colour and texture.  Everything was very soft. And the droplets of dew accentuated that.  I pulled out my telephoto zoom to pull the flower in close and I noticed the contrasting texture of the hair on the stems of the plant.  Normally I don’t like to have something obstructing my view of the main subject but I feel as though the out of focus stem of grass in the foreground adds to the sense of crowding and compression that was a part of the live scene.  Normally I don’t play much with filters or heavy post processing effects but in this case I applied some effects from Nik Colour Efex Pro and I was quite happy with the result.  

-Russell Berg

The same image after processing. Canon EOS XSi EF 70-300mm at 300mm f/5.6 1/350 ISO 800 −1ev