Swallowing The Chairs

Andrew turned the corner and stopped, it was for him a very familiar spot, a place where he came every day to catch the bus.  In fact he came here so often to wait for the bus that he had made his own bus stop bench by bringing over three lawn chairs that he had stolen from Wilson’s house.  He had, at first taken one chair and brought it there but it seemed out of place, unbalanced and so he brought another, and another until he had what amounted to a bus stop bench where another person could sit down without the social awkwardness that comes from sitting right next to a stranger.  Andrew doubted that Wilson had ever even noticed that the chairs were gone; his yard was like a great resting place for the rusting, unused, discards of an entire city.  There was a sense of finality about this moment though.  He wasn’t just waiting for a bus, he was waiting for the bus.  The bus which would turn the corner, travel down Nicol street and stop around the corner from the Salvation Army Men’s Shelter and stop, it would continue on its route circling the south end of the city until it travelled past Andrew’s improvised bus stop bench once again.  This time though, Andrew would not be on it, he was leaving and he didn’t expect he would return.

One morning I was driving around the south downtown area of Nanaimo looking for good images.  I spent a good part of the day looking around for images and two of my best are in the posts here and here.  As I turned a corner I noticed a very large abandoned lot that was completely overgrown.  Living in a temperate rainforest means that it doesn’t take long for nature to reclaim its primacy over the sculpted lawns and neat curbstones.  Someone had left three lawn chairs sitting right at the corner of the intersection and the ivy and the grasses had grown through, around, and over them.  There was an interesting story here and I wanted an image that helped to start the story.  When I pulled the image  into Aperture I knew I wanted it in black and white and as I started to play with it in Nik Silver Efex Pro I decided to create a bit of an area of mystery and depth so I darkened the triangle in the upper right area of the image until it was almost black.  I wanted to create the perception that something could be coming out of the forest behind you, if you ever sat down in those chairs.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Space in His Head

Lentzer walked slowly through the park.  He had been this way before, many times.  It was the place he went when his headed needed space to breathe, when the confusion that circled inside of him now would often begin to untangle itself.  Not today.  The tangled knots remained and his head remained a claustrophobic space; a small closed room on hot summer day.  His thoughts could not get space to breathe.  He kicked through the carpet of fallen leaves on the grass and moved on maybe he needed to sit by the stream.

The vibrant colours of the fallen autumn leaves presented a compelling study in colour.  The leaves had fallen out of a single maple tree and they were scattered around.  I knew that I wanted a photograph that had a field of view that was completely dominated by this red orange colour so I had to move myself around to get a perspective that had nothing in the background.  Sometimes we photographers get lazy when we say things like “there was nothing I could do about it, that power pole was in the frame.”  We decide what is in the frame, we decide where we are standing, what is in focus, what lens to use, and where we point the camera.  If we aren’t happy with what is in the frame then we need to move, crop, change lens, or change aperture.  The photograph that we take is all of ours and everything in it is there because we have chosen to let it remain there.

-Russell Berg

Death of A Leaf

A leaf dies slowly on the tree, it’s decay an amazing mixture of colour and form. Fuji X10 at 7mm f/2 1/1000 ISO 400

I continued wandering through Beban Park and saw this leaf just barely clinging to the tree and dying in such a beautiful display.  I loved the way that the colour and form, especially the negative space formed by the parts of the leaf that had already decayed to be especially interesting.  The light was so bright, however, that it was hard to distinguish the background from the foreground when I took the photo and I knew that this picture had a lot of potential but that it was going to require some work in post.  After importing the image into Aperture I increased the saturation slightly and started to play with ways to pull the leaf off of the background.  I increased the definition and this helped to make the edges more distinct but it still needed more so I burned in the photo on the edges and the parts of the background that showed through the holes in the leaf to darken it.  This got me part of the way there but the colours were still so bright on the edges so I applied a gamma vignette that desaturated and darkened the edges some more.  I applied a little more burn in to the holes in the leaf and it was there.  The treatment added a lot of depth to the image and allowed this wonderful leaf to stand out from the background.

-Russell Berg

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