The Sun

I hurried out to Neck Point on a May evening to catch the sunset.  I hurried around to a position so that I would be looking west over the water and discovered that I had a very striking background to a silhouette of some people who had also come out to watch the same sunset.  I snapped off a few quick ones and saw that the atmospheric conditions were giving a beautiful golden yellow glow to my pictures.  I began to watch for an interesting foreground moment with the people who were out in front watching the sun go down.  I was a long ways back so I wasn’t worried about them seeing me losing the natural body language of the moment but there was a sign in the way that kept getting into the frame.  I shifted around and finally the people moved off to the left.  I took quite a few pictures but there were two other moments that I really liked; the man and woman in the frame above sat at a picnic table and she leaned in towards him, (left), I really liked the body language in that moment.  The other one was of a group of younger people; they were standing and talking and watching and the sun caught very nicely in their hair, (bottom left).  In the end I liked the hopeful nature of the man standing, putting both his hands over his eyes and staring out into the sunset and the counterbalance on the left side of the frame that the silhouette of the tree provides.  The last element that really made the decision for me was the fact that I had closed down my aperture and produced a depth of field that produced a sharp foreground and maintained focus on the sunset.  The photo is really about the sun so having it dominate was pretty important.  A few minutes later I got a non-silhouetted image of two people watching the sunset, and, each other.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Lovers

I was wandering around Neck Point because I came to see the sunset and make some photographs. It was a beautiful warm evening with the sun dropping into the ocean in a beautiful warm glow.  The sun had gone down behind some clouds and the showy part of the sunset was over when I saw this couple alone  on the grass.  I circled behind them and snapped a few pictures from a distance.  He leaned forward to kiss her cheek and it was the perfect instance that defined their moment together.    It is a moment filled with little intimacies, the little tattoo behind her ear, his arm around her back and... the kiss.  With the the sun still glinting in the grasses around them it is a tender moment shared by two lovers with the ocean the mountains in the background.  Henri Cartier-Bresson, an amazing French photographer, talked about finding the decisive moment that defines a situation or a personality or a relationship.  I think this moment comes pretty close to matching Cartier-Bresson’s criteria.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Windblown

Andrea stands wondering, her back is to the water as she leans against the rock.  She has the happy tired feeling of contentment in her bones and and a light smile plays at the corners of her lips.  This has been an incredibly difficult year but now everything that she has faced, well almost everything, is behind her.  There were moments when she wondered if it would all be possible, but now…  Now she smiles, looks down for a moment at her shoes and turns towards the water, her face into the wind.

At Neck Point in Nanaimo there is a wonderful tree that is clinging to a rock on the edge of the ocean.  It looks as though it has experienced decades of hurricane force winds that have forced it to grow sideways out of the rock.  I have photographed this tree several times but I wanted to produce something very moody and evocative that helped to tell the story of the trees struggle for survival.  I pulled one of my exposures into Nik Silver Efex Pro and began to work on it.  I used a high contrast filter and but that made the ocean and horizon almost black so I added control points to the water to increase the brightness of that area.  I also wanted a more dramatic sky so I darkened the top ⅓ of the frame.  I really like the way that the tree exists as a silhouette in a state of tension between the dark sky and the dark water with a band of light running through the middle of the frame.

-Russell Berg

If you are interested in more tree photography check here and here.  Or type 'tree' into the search bar.​

Blackstone

Wet rocks shining in the sun. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 70-300mm at 70mm f/11 1/100 ISO 125

It seems that many of the photos that have ended up on this blog have been taken at Neck Point.  It is a compelling place with some very interesting geography.  On the beach there is a sloping expanse of small black pebbles that get covered with water at least once a day.  On this day as I arrived in the morning someone had been out ahead of me and I was struck by the strongly graphic image that was presented by their foot-steps.  I knew this image would be best in black and white and when I processed it in Nik Silver Effects Pro I increased the structure and contrast to bring up to make the rocks really shine.

-Russell Berg

Curious Quail

A quail gives a quizzical backward glance from a branch near Neck Point. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300 at 300mm f/5.6 1/400 ISO 640

I was walking out to Neck Point in Nanaimo when I heard a rustling in the thick undergrowth.  I stopped and stood still for a moment and suddenly some movement caught my eye on the branch above my head.  Normally if I am walking around with both a wide angle and telephoto lens I will have the telephoto on my camera.  I figure that if a beautiful picture requiring a wide angle presents itself if is most likely to be a landscape that is not going to move, however, if I see something that requires a telephoto, like some wildlife, it is most likely not going to wait around for me to change lenses so I had better be ready.  On this day, that thinking paid off.  The quail was up on the branch but moving around a fair bit so I got it in frame quickly and squeezed off a bunch of photos.  They were all fairly standard bird in a tree images and I was hoping for something that would express a little of the bird’s personality.  Suddenly it turned away from me as though it were going to jump from the branch and just before it did it looked back towards me.  I love the curve of it’s head, the curious eye contact and the pretentiously comical feather sprouting from the top of it’s head.  I wasn’t happy with in the image were how bright the branch was so I burned it in then reduced highlights in Aperture.  I also wish I had the Photoshop skills to remove the smaller branch that crosses the bird’s legs and the dark leaf in front of the large branch but overall I am pretty happy with the image.

-Russell Berg