Painting With Light

In my last post I was playing with light indoors, both as a modifier to the image and as the subject.  For these pictures I was playing with light as I rode home on the ferry.  I live on an island so riding the ferry is a regular part of my life and one evening as we were approaching Nanaimo I was out on the deck with my camera and tripod.  I was in the bow of the boat as we headed in close to the city and I used a 30second exposure with my lens at it’s widest focal length, (17mm)  I held it there for several seconds then zoomed in during the exposure to create the light trails and stayed at the longest focal length, (55mm) for several more seconds.  When I got it back to my computer I played with the saturation and the contrast quite a bit to get a pretty striking image.  Luckily it was a pretty calm night, so the boat was not moving up and down and my light trails have just enough movement in them to give the thread like appearance but not so much that they are jiggling all over the place.  The long exposure also smoothed out the water providing a nice contrast to the harsh lines of light in the top of the frame.  The image is a not a literal representation of anything, but rather my light painting of Nanaimo at night.  Below are some of my other experiments with light on that same ferry trip.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Glass of Light

Lately it has been so rainy and grey that I have been frustrated with wanting to go outside and make photographs and being faced with the same wet, grey light.  So I decided this morning to create my own light and do a still life.  I hung a string of Christmas lights at the end of my hallway and place a vase filled with more Christmas lights sitting on a stool quite near the camera.  I used a 50mm lens and opened it up to f2.8 to turn the christmas lights into soft bubbles of light.  I was having trouble balancing the light in the vase with the glow of the hanging Christmas lights.  The Christmas lights were illuminating the hallway too much so I added a flash at very low power, (1/64).  I put a snoot on the flash to reduce light spill and dropped the shutter speed to as low as I could go to get and still retain the glow out of the lights in the vase.  It was a bit of a tough balancing act to deal with the three light sources, keep the hallway as dark as possible, and keep the vase lit but still glowing.  If I turned up the flash too much, it washed out the glow of the lights inside the vase.  If I increased the shutter speed to kill the ambient light in the hall, then I lost the glow in the vase.  I got as close as I could then I darkened the hallway in Nik Viveza.  It turned out pretty good but the low level of light in the vase makes it look as though the edge of the vase has curves in it.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

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

When Light Curves

Playing with light on a beautiful white vase. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85 at 30mm f/8 1/250 ISO 100

The curve and line of the thing pulls my hand to it.  Every time I see it I want to touch it.  I is light and cool with a milky form that invites inspection and exploration.  Even all on it's own, just sitting there on the table it seems to absorb the light in the way that a white thing should not.  It is a beautifully made thing.

One afternoon during Christmas vacation I decided to pull out my lights and photography this vase.  My wife buys vases, alot of vases but this one in particular I really like.  The shape and texture of the thing where made to have light playing against it.  I set up on a tripod in front of the kitchen table and draped some black fabric over a chair that I had put on top of the table.  This was my very "high tech" studio.  I started by setting an exposure that would completely kill the ambient light, (my first frames where completely black), then I started layering in light.  For this image I used 2 flashes that where mounted off camera and triggered by Cactus V4 strobes, (very inexpensive and very reliable with fresh batteries).  The camera left flash was set at 1/32 power and mounted on a light stand and had a small, 6"x4", light box velcroed to it.  I wanted the light to be softer coming from the left but I didn't want the full wrap around that an umbrella would provide.  I really wanted the camera right side of the vase to be brightly lit and yet to maintain an area of shadow to emphasize the three- dimensionality and shape of the vase.  I put a homemade cardboard snoot ala David Hobby on my second flash and held it at extreme camera right with very low power, 1/64 or 1/128.  It turned out that I needed a pretty extreme angle to get the effect I was looking for.  The snooted flash is behind the vase pointing back at the camera at a slight angle so that the flash head is visible in the uncropped frame.  I knew I wanted a square composition so the flash was going to get cropped out anyway.  It was very cool to be able to paint the light the way I wanted it to look.

-Russell Berg

Below is another shot that I took without the snooted flash at camera right.  I like this one too especially the way that the left edge of the vase is well defined and the right edge falls away into shadow.

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