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

Orange Leaves

Orange leaves filter the morning light. Fuji X10 at 14mm f/5.6 1/85 ISO 200

The end of things is a beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking time.  We stand in the satisfied exhaustion of a job well done and we see the beautiful thing that we have made and we know that for now it is ending. But the work that we have done has had a lasting and worthwhile impact.  That is what fall is like for me.  It is so beautiful but it is a kind of death, an ending.

I went out last weekend on Saturday morning because the sunlight was so beautiful and the colours of the autumn leaves were so spectacular.  I wanted to be able to catch the vivid display while the beautiful morning light was so nice.  I found some beautiful trees in Beban Park in Nanaimo and looked for an interesting way to photograph them. The morning light was still not too strong but it supplied just the right amount of light for the slightly translucent leaves as they stood out against the sky. I took a couple of photos with the leaves at dead centre but I looked for a contrast in colour and texture so I shifted to the side and composed the frame to include the gnarled branches of the old maple.  The branches were far enough back to go nicely out of focus so as not to distract from the leaves but also to provide contrast and context.

-Russell Berg

Dragonfly

The dramatic colours of a dragonfly. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 22mm f/4.5 1/250 ISO 200

I was driving around town with my windows open and a dragonfly flew in the passenger window smacked against something hard and died.  When I got home I took looked at the poor insects and his body was still in remarkably good shape so I took it out to a very shady part of the the backyard and setup to photograph it.  I set up my flash on a stand and began to figure out my exposure.  As I learned from David Hobby (He has a very good tutorial on learning to use your flash in manual mode.  Check it out you will learn a lot.), I started with an exposure that would allow me to eliminate the ambient light so that the background would go very dark.  This meant using a relatively high shutter speed.  If you look at this image without flash it is basically black even though it was the middle of the day.  This allowed me to completely control the light in the scene.  From there it is just a matter of adjusting the power of the flash until I got the effect I wanted.  I used one Sigma EF-G 530 flash inside a shoot-through umbrella set at 1/16 power.  The umbrella gave the light a nice wrap around effect and placed a nice circular blue-white highlight in the tops of the dragonfly’s eyes.

-Russell Berg

"We Are More"

Canon EOS XSi EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/13 1/250 ISO 800. Bruised in the pavement, I love the colours of this leaf.

It is a difficult thing to define a country. Such a big thing, an idea, a set of peoples, and perceptions. One starts and stops, begins again and finds oneself up against a barrier of language and expression. Lately I have been listening to spoken word artists like Sage Francis and Shane Coyczan and it is Coyczan's poem "We Are More" that I think comes closest to overcoming those barriers. It is joyously hopeful and very Canadian without being jingoistic.

I wanted a photo that said some of the same things. I wanted it to use Canadian imagery in a non-traditional way. One fall I drove around Nanaimo to photograph the change in colour and I found some beautiful maple leaves. I took some standard pictures then took one leaf home with me. I wanted an image that would go beyond the traditional pastoral landscapes and reflect the growing importance of urban landscapes in the Canadian psyche. I put the leaf on the pavement and drove over it a few times with my car, they are surprisingly tough, to bruise and mark it. This was getting closer but the pavement didn't provide the right contrast yet; it needed more punch so I brought out my hose and wet it down. This left me with exactly the right kind of colour and shine for both the leaf and the pavement and the textures just jumped. I was quite happy with the image, my only hesitation is that the end of the stem runs out of the frame.

-Russell Berg

The original leaf before I drove over it is below.

Tasting Green

The textures and character of this green leaf leapt out at me. EOS 7D, EFS 50mm 1.4 at f/2.5 1/250, ISO 110, Lumopro flash at 1/32 power

I have often wondered what a blind person’s ideas about colour might be.  How do you tell someone who has been blind from birth what green is.  I had a friend who became blind as an adult due to a car accident.  She told me that when she needed to remind herself what green was she would eat an avocado.  When I made this picture I wanted the same kind of intense green feeling that biting into an avocado would give you.  That, and the texture of the leaf needed to be explored.  I took this picture in Victoria, BC on a kind of overcast, grey day and I could see that the texture was there but I didn’t feel like it would come through in a photograph without some special treatment.  I put a flash on the ground below the leaf and used Cactus brand wireless trigger to fire it.  I had to experiment with the power a little bit to get the exposure right but eventually the green just leapt off of my LCD screen and I could see the light of the flash pushing through the veins in the plant illuminating all of that glorious complexity.

-Russell Berg