Blue Lake

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

Mountain Ridge

Dramatic Rocky Mountain ridge near Banff, AB. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 12mm f/11 1/320 ISO 100

The great rocks reach out and pull us in even while they dominate our senses and produce in us a kind of fear tinged with awe.  We stand before them and we know that our mortality is a certain thing and yet our will to live, to experience them, just to stand and see them is so strong. 

Finding a way to present a photograph of a mountain that is not tired and cliche can be a challenge.  For landscape photographers they present an irresistible draw so finding a way to stand out from the millions of mountain photographs is difficult.  When I saw this mountain ridge near Banff on a sunny afternoon I knew that I wanted a very high contrast black and white image with an almost black sky and a black foreground.  I underexposed by one stop to darken the sky and took the image.   I used a very wide angle, 12mm, to allow the range to spread out through the frame, giving the ridge lots of length instead of the traditional towering height that mountains often get in landscape photography.  The image is made more dynamic by the strong visual weight on the left of the photograph and it pulls your eye to the right as the ridge diminishes into the distance.  I brought the image into Nik Silver Efex Pro and applied a high contrast under-exeposed filter to it.  This produced the black skies and the silver mountains that appear almost to float.  Below is the unprocessed colour version of the photograph and you can see how much more dramatic, how much more powerful the image is in black and white.

-Russell Berg

Below is a more tradition composition of the same mountain with it rising higher in the frame.  I feel that the first image with it’s space to breathe and the way it pulls your eye through the frame is a much more powerful photograph.

Mountains rising out of the plain near Banff. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 22mm f/10 11/250 ISO 100