Drunken Mailboxes

I really enjoy my photographic equipment.  I like reading manuals and reviews and sometimes I get wrapped up in the technical stuff at the expense of going out and making images.  When that happens I like to force myself to simplify, so on a recent cycling trip around Hornby and Denman Islands I took only the phone that was on my camera.  I don’t often take my camera with me when I am biking but on this trip I was determined to go out with just my phone and come back with some decent images.  This week you will see them here.

I flashed past these mailboxes and as I looked back at them the image of 6 drunken friends stumbling home in the too bright sunlight of the morning after flashed through my mind.  I knew that angle and perspective would be important here as I hadn’t noticed anything until I was almost past the mailboxes so taking a picture from straight on would not produce a strong image.  I leaned in to the mailbox and allowed the right mailbox to fill the frame, this forced the further mailboxes to recede into the frame and exaggerated the lean.  When I got the image home, the fact that the mailboxes where green and the foreground and the background was green made the image pretty monochromatic anyway, and as I wanted to emphasize the form I converted everything to black and white.

iPhone Series # 1   iPhone Series # 2   iPhone Series # 3

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Portrait of Friends

Portrait of friends. Canon XSi EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/4 1/40 ISO 200

They look at each other and a smile is made in the moment between two sentences.  Their smiles begin, pause, and crack into laughter.  They each know the story that the other is remembering without having to acknowledge it with much more than a smile and a tilt of the head.  The friendship was born in sandboxes and sleepovers and now it is something different, something stronger.

I was doing headshots for a couple of young actors and two of them wanted to do a portrait together.  They were clearly good friends and I wanted to pose them in a way that reflected that.  I had the girl on the left lean in and touch heads, that little bit of contact seemed to speak clearly to me of their friendship.  At camera left I had a flash in an umbrella to balance the fill from a large window at camera right.  I was really happy with the way the catch light from the window is reflected in the eye of the girl at left.  They seemed to be suppressing the laughter that rises from the memory of a funny story and I was very happy to be able to capture that moment.

-Russell Berg