Purple Night

I recently took a solo boat trip down to DeCourcy Island and I was hoping to make some decent nighttime images.  I had been messing around on the other side of the island where my day time scouting had determined that I was going to get the best images, (turned out I couldn’t get anything good there), and was heading back to my dinghy when I saw a boat behind this old tree.  It was very dark out, almost 10:30, so it took a little bit of work to get myself and my tripod into a position to frame the boat between the two branches.  The wind was starting to come up so the fellow on the boat was going out to check the lines coming off his stern, (the green lights extending from the back of the boat are from his head lamp shining on the water as he paddle to shore).  I did four exposures of a minute each and I felt lucky that the boat was relatively sharp in this one as it was quite windy and I was sure that the motion would show up as blur.  Using a wide angle lens, 10mm, allowed me to get close to the tree and have it dominate the frame but even though the moon was out there wasn’t enough light on it so I lit it up with my flashlight during the long exposure.  I am quite happy with the result.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

A Negotiated Peace

A wonderful battered old Gary Oak on the shores of Vancouver Island. Canon EOS XSi EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.4 1/4000 ISO 200

The wind blows here.  It winds and twists over the rocks and finds its way through the trees to the place where you are sitting.  The wind does find you but not until after the trees have negotiated a kind of peace for you.  They have protected you and they are true.  You look out from your protected space at the centre of the grove and the sweep of the ocean, the grand rise of the mountains on the mainland, and these trees they all seem to conspire to give you peace.  They all seem to slow your mind and calm your spirit and you take a deep breath. 

There is a wonderful grove of twisted, gnarled old Gary Oak trees at Piper's Lagoon in Nanaimo that is really beautiful.  The trees have grown up on the shore line and have twisted and turned themselves in an apparent attempt to get out of the wind.  They stand on top of a hill that overlooks the Georgia Strait.  I wanted to capture the texture of the bark of these trees so I opened up my lens as far as it would go to get that shallow depth of field and isolate the tree against the background.  I got the shot I wanted but I still wanted to emphasize the texture of the bark some more so I added a bleach bypass filter in Nik Colour Efex Pro. 

-Russell Berg