The wind, the rain, and the ocean sometimes do a wonderful job to produce some very interesting erosion patterns in the driftwood. This large stump had been hollowed out form the middle. I squeezed myself into the middle of this stump with my wide angle lens to get the feeling of a dragon coiled around me. I loved the way that the root in the middle looked like a dragon’s head (1) that was looking out to the sky. I wanted to give the dragon something to look at so I brightened the sky so that it would appear as though the dragon was looking out to the sunset (2). There were going to be a couple of issues with the photograph though. I wanted to keep everything in focus from the wood 10 cm in front of my lens (3) to the island 5km away on the horizon (4). A wide angle lens will naturally help keep more of the frame in focus but I also stopped down my aperture to f/10. The second issue was the huge dynamic range that I was dealing with. The sky and the background was very bright and the foreground was in deep shadow. No one exposure could take in that variation in brightness, not without some manipulation. If I had exposed for the shadowy logs, the sky would be too bright, If I exposed for the sky the logs would be black. I shot a medium exposure and that leaned towards the highlights and took it in to Nik HDR. That program does some serious digital voodoo and pulled the detail out of the logs.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

A cold mountain lake near Banff. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 16mm f/9 1/160 ISO 100

She stands in the water knee deep and alone, staring off into a landscape that is overwhelming in its beauty. The cold is seeping into her skin, slowing her blood and making her bones ache. It is the kind of cold that takes your breath away, the kind of cold that slows movement at your joints and gives you a headache. Tomorrow morning, before the mists have been burned away by the rising sun she will swim this lake.

My daughter raced in a triathlon in Banff and this was the lake where the swim portion of the course place in. The lake was glacier fed and very cold so I wanted to produce an image that expressed how cold the lake was. First I cropped the image down to produce a more symmetrical tree line at both edges of the frame. I wanted the highest point of the tree lines to be very near the edge of the frame so both sides of the image pull down and in towards the mountain in the background. I also adjusted the crop in the foreground to place the first rock in the very bottom right corner of the frame. These almost completely black shapes pull your eye into the image from the bottom right an out to the mountain in the background. The image of the mountain happens at the intersection of three curves all of which pull your eye in to the centre. This was taken on a bright sunny day so to get the cold feeling I converted to black and white in Nik Silver Efex Pro and then reduced the exposure to darken it and added a cross process in Aperture that introduced the blue tint.

-Russell Berg

Dragon's Watch

Blue Lake