Snow Day

We had a snow day this week where school was cancelled and I decided to dedicate the day to photography.  This is my journey that day.  I went out early to the marina because I love the idea of boats with snow, there’s a juxtaposition there that I think is interesting.  I got down really low on the dock and hung my camera over the edge with a wide angle lens to place the boats in a dominant position in the frame with the snowy trees to form the background.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm 1/1250 f/3.5 ISO 1250

I kept walking around the marina and I saw a place where the snow had fallen into the water in front of a sail boat.  I was sticking with my wide angle 10-22mm at its widest to play with the angles of the floating snow against the angles of the bow of the boat.  I felt like there were some interesting relationships there.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF-S 10-22mm at 13mm 1/1000 f/4 ISO 3200

As I was packing up my car to leave the marina, I saw the snow plow go by on Stewart Ave.  I thought to myself, what image says snow day more than a snow plow so I raced off after the plow.  They stopped in a nearby parking lot so I went up to them and asked if I could take their picture and where would they be plowing next?  They told me that they were heading up 19A but had a few repairs to do.  I went up the road, parked my car and got out to wait for them.  30 minutes of standing beside the road later I was paid off with this image as the truck roared by.  I did get soaked but it was so worth it.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF-S 10-22mm at 21mm 1/1250 f/4.5 ISO 2500

From there I started driving around some neighbourhoods just watching for interesting photographs and I found this older gentleman shovelling his sidewalk.  I went up to him and we had a little conversation and asked if I could photograph him while he worked.  He was fine with that, such a nice man with a face full of character and we had an interesting conversation afterwards.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF-S 10-22mm at 21mm 1/1250 f/4.5 ISO 2500

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF 70–200mm + 2x at 292mm 1/12500 f/5.6 ISO 200

Later in the afternoon, after the sun came out I thought I might get some good photos of the sea lions down at Duke Point as the sun went down.  The quality of the light is so key in making a good photograph and the low winter sunset produced some beautiful light.  In my boat as I headed out there I crossed paths with a large freighter.  I loved the contrast in colours and the striking lines created by the anchor chain, it’s shadow and the other anchor in the background.  I waited until Snake Island drifted into view in the background and got this image.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF 70–200mm at 200mm 1/1000 f/2.8 ISO 100

My timing with the light was just about perfect as the sun began to disappear over the horizon just as I was finishing my photographs of the sea lions.  The golden light plays over their dark brown fur to create some really beautiful colours.

That was my snow day, I had a blast.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Exploring The Dry Dock

The Nanaimo Boatyards is home to a remarkable old building that holds a dry dock for large boats to come in and get some maintenance done.  I don’t know how old it is but is there ever a lot of character in the building.  The textures and tones were so interesting and they were all the more so when I converted the image to black and white.  As I was looking at the image at full magnification when I began to prepare this post I realized that I may have had more than one image here.  There were little stories that the picture was telling throughout the building so I cropped in tight on some of the interesting areas.  Check them out below, you definitely give away some resolution but I think the results are pretty interesting.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

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

Pushed Around

We took some of my prairie family on a little boat trip out to see the sea lions, (pictures of those are coming), that winter in Nanaimo near the Harmac Pulp Mill.  On the way we saw this crew loading a barge with logs from the log booms that were floating in the water.  The tug would maneuver logs from the boom so that they were within reach of the crane then the crane operator would hoist them up on to the barge.  It was a fascinating operation and I wanted to get an image that would capture as much of the dynamic motion as you can in a still image.  Before I got this image I got some pictures of the logs coming up out of the water and the water rushing off of them but we weren’t in the right position to get the tug in the frame as well.  I maneuvered around and waited for the next lift.  These tugs dip and dive in the water, heeling over very steeply and I was rewarded with this tug turning sharply to maneuver just as the logs came up out of the water.  The image tells whole story and the movement of the machines is accentuated by the dynamic slash of orange (1.) that cuts across the frame from bottom left corner to upper right.  The other payoff is that you can see both the tug and crane operators (2.).  I was very happy with the result.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Limitations

Limitations can push creativity.  I recently got a Fuji X-E2 and the only lens I have is a 14mm.  I have always been a slave to the zoom and I feel like I always feel as thought I am going to miss shots if I leave a certain focal range at home.  This means that I am often walking around with a lot of gear, and I still like the versatility that this gives me but the other day, with my new Fuji I found my creativity being pushed in interesting directions because I had some self-imposed limits.  The single prime lens became a stimulus to think about the photos that I would make in a different way and I came up with some interesting results.  In this image the sky was very dramatic and the stump provided a compelling foreground element.  With a 14mm lens you can get quite close and by stopping down the aperture to f/11 everything from one metre in front of me out to the horizon was in focus.  The light was really helping to make things dramatic and the dynamic range of this Fuji sensor did not let the front of the backlit stump lose detail in the blacks. Below I have included a little gallery of other images I got on and around this stump.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com