Fixing The Window

I stood in the parking lot of a 7-11 looking at this house.  I had been out driving around looking for interesting images and this house grabbed my eye, I had done a u-turn at the next intersectionand now I had to figure out how to make the image.  I felt as though the house needed to have a very straightforward angle, nothing fancy, so I chose to shoot it straight on, so the viewer could only see the front wall of the house.  It felt almost as though this is what would have been drawn in the set director’s sketchbook when the scene from the movie called for a rundown house with some character so I wanted it to look, as much as possible like a facade so I shot it straight on.  I was also pretty sure that I wanted to end up with a square frame, I felt that it fit the visual language of the house so now I just had to choose which side of the house put on the edge of the frame.  The rather lifeless looking tree on the right side, fit into the frame better than the spruce trees on the left and they added to the mood and tone that already existed in the house.  I was also pretty sure, right from the start that the house needed to be slightly off-centre so all of these ideas came together in the composition that you see here.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Paul leaned forward on the ladder his position, somewhat precarious.  He felt the old gutter pipe bend and give a little more as he leaned forward.  The stairwell window had been leaking and there was now a brown stain on the plaster on the the inside wall.  He had watched the stain grow every time he climbed the stairs to his room over the last two months.  He had noticed it when it was just a small semi-circle under the moulding around the window but now it was overlapping layers of brown streaks running from the edge of the window to the floor.  In some ways it had marked the passage of time in his life better than the calendar, better than the schedule at his job assembling fences at construction sites, better than the mounting number of days that had passed since he had last spoken to his father.  But now, now it was time to fix it, now it was time to put a fresh layer of caulk around each pane.  This might stop the water from making the stain grow, but it wouldn’t stop the unending rows of construction fencing and it for sure would not make his father pick up the phone.  But… it would stop the leak.

Holding Tight

The old girl wallows a bit in heavy seas, the bilge pumps too slowly, and the starter needs a tap of the hammer to get it going but she has plied the waters of the inside passage for 6 decades, hauled halibut, herring, crab, and prawns, and brought her crew home safely every time.  At times the water, has come over the bow, the engine has refused to sputter to life, the electrical systems have all gone dark but every time, with the help, urging, and cursing of her crew she has eventually roared to life and brought them safely home.  Now she rests, the water laps gently agains the wooden hull in this protected passage and she holds tightly to the safety of the dock.

I was floating down Newcastle Passage heading back to my slip when I saw this old boat.  I knew that it would provide for an interesting subject but there were a few challenges.  There was a mess of distracting and uninteresting colours and a very busy background.  The first step was to convert to black and white.  That instantly improved the image but I still wasn’t getting the texture and the age of the vessel.  I have tried this kind of thing in Silver Efex Pro but Nik has another plugin called HDR Efex that really pulls the texture out of an image in an interesting way.  The peeling paint, the dents and the age of the boat really came forward.  Next I had to deal with the background.  I added control points all over the background in each different tonal area that allowed me to darken the background and separate the boat from it.  It’s better but still not completely successful.  The fact that I am using a telephoto lens here works against me being able to separate the boat from the background as telephotos tend to compress your image.  The next thing that I wanted to do was to enhance and brighten the silvery smooth water.  I felt like this would provide an interesting contrast to the battered boat so I brightened the water and increased the contrast.  If there is one thing that I am still unhappy with it is that I wish there where a little more breathing space on either end of the boat inside the frame.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Elbow on the Sill

I have found the city of Victoria and it’s architecture to be a significant inspiration for me.  There is something that strikes me as I wander those streets with my camera that pushes the photographer in me to see things differently.  I find the parts of a city that are on the edges of survival to have a truth in them that is so much more beautiful than the manicured lawns and refinished driveways of suburbia.  The texture of this wall jumped out at me as a wonderful background to the three black openings of the windows.  The texture of the glass that remains in the windows provides an interesting counterpoint to the yawning darkness below.  The rusty stains around the edges and the lichens growing on the window sills bear silent testimony to dozens of winters, to hundreds of eyes looking out, to the arms resting on summer evenings watching the city walk by.

Other Victoria images here, here, and here​

-Russell Berg

Bike and Bricks

I struggled with this photo for quite a while.  I loved the curve and shape of the bike, (1) the fact that the handlebars have tassels, (2) the fact that both tires are too flat to ride, (3) the battered old seat (4).  All of these things were great but the bike was a mottled rusty dark green against an orange brick wall and it just didn’t have the punch that I felt the image needed.  Recently I have gone back through some of my images with the intent of reevaluating my images with  a B&W treatment in mind.  I liked it much better this time around.  I really wish I had taken the time to move the potted tree outside of the frame.

-Russell Berg

The Walls Close In

A narrow alleyway in downtown Victoria. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm f/8 1/20 ISO 1250

Victoria, BC has a wonderful old downtown area with some very interesting and narrow alleys.  I stumbled on to this as I was wandering through the city and was struck by the graphic nature of the tight brick walls, the plank ceiling and the bare bulb that hung in the middle.  I used a wide angle lens to emphasize the enclosing feeling of the alley and the shift in perspective almost makes it feel as though the walls wrap around you.  In the original frame the bare bulb light was visible but I cropped it out as the extreme contrast in brightness was distracting.  I also really liked the way that the splashes of light on the walls imply the bulb on the ceiling without us having to see it.  The exposure was also somewhat tricky, it the camera read the exposure off the bright area in the centre all of the walls would have been very close to black.  I used spot metering and took a reading off of the area just this side of the light area and I got a decent exposure.  I am still not entirely happy with how bright the opening is but of course at the end of every tunnel…

-Russell Berg