Sometimes Red...

Sometimes red is just red and sometimes it is blood and passion and loyalty.  Sometimes red is the heat of anger, the all encompassing compulsion of love, the binding rage of jealousy.  But sometimes red… is just red.

One fall I was walking around taking photos of the beautiful foliage and on impulse I picked up one leaf that I thought was particularly beautiful and I carried it around all over town taking pictures of it in different circumstances.  (See another example of a portrait of this leaf here.)  The leaf had such a wonderful colour and vein structure that I wanted an image that would really emphasize these two characteristics so I looked for a place where I could place it so that it would appear alone against the backdrop of the high sky.  I twisted the stem around a small branch that was hanging down above me, composed so that you couldn’t see any other branches and took the picture underexposing a little.  I pumped up the saturation levels a little and increased the contrast to give the red some real punch.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Oranges In The Light

A high key still life of oranges and pomegranates. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85mm at 65mm f/6.3 1.250

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.

-Edouard Manet

I have always liked the effect of producing high key still life images and I wanted to try and produce one myself.  I set up a white background on our kitchen table and pulled out some fruit and a white plate.   I started with setting up a manual exposure on the camera that would eliminate all ambient light.  Basically I took pictures without flash and reduced the exposure until the picture was almost black, this indicates that there is no ambient light hitting the sensor.  Then I started to add flash.  In order to make the background disappear. I had to put a significant amount of light on it.  The background itself was not pure white, it was an off-white linen kind of material I increased the power on the flash until the background turned pure white and the texture disappeared.  Then I added another flash below the camera pointing directly at the fruit.  I had a small fabric lightbox on this flash and I increased the power until I got nice highlights from the orange.  Overall I was pretty happy but I would like to have been able to eliminate the shadows in the foreground.

-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