Improvisation

This is what the pen looked like without the iPhone light

How to build a two light off camera setup without any photo gear.

This summer my car was broken into and just about all of my camera gear was stolen so I haven’t really felt much like keeping this blog updated.  Last night I was fiddling with one of my fountain pens and the orange celluloid of my Delta Dolce Vita seems to glow with an internal fire.  I thought to myself that it would be awesome to have a lamp shade made of this material so I turned off the lights and set the cap of my pen on top of a little flashlight.  It was so beautiful.  I took some pictures of the cap with the one camera I had that wasn't stolen, but then I realized that  with the high contrast setup the carving details on the cap band were lost.  If I had had all of my gear my instinct would have been to pull out one of my flashes, put an orange gel on it to match the light coming from inside the pen and fire away.  Since all of my stuff was stolen I didn’t have that option so it occurred to me to remove the blind cap from the back of the pen cover and use it to cover the light on my iPhone and use that to light up the carving on the cap band.  This had the benefit of turning the light exactly the same colour as the light that was glowing out of the cap but the drawback of being very dim so I had to hold the whole thing very close.  I like the way it turned out and the fact that I didn’t have all my gear meant that I had to come up with a pretty innovative solution that probably made the image better.  Who knows, it certainly was fun.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

For those of you unfamiliar with fountain pens this is the Delta Dolce Vita Oro in a more traditional lighting treatment.

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Vandal

There is a section of downtown Tacoma that is a haven for graffiti artists.  My wife and I were wandering around the area on a sleepy Sunday morning when we stumbled across a parking garage that was completely empty except for a painter going to work on the interior.   Every wall of the garage was covered in graffiti and deep in the interior was this guy working away on a new piece.  I took some pictures of the pieces nearer the entry and then moved closer to where he was working.  I watched him paint for a while and then asked if I could film him for a while.  He said yes and he became part of a short video that I made about the artists I encountered on the trip.  We talked a bit and he told me that the owner of the garage let them paint on the interior of the garage on Sundays when there were no cars around.  I asked if I could do a portrait of him and he agreed to stand in front of one of his pieces but he wanted to keep his mask on.  He leaned up against the wall and I got the image below.  I liked the contrast of the bright colours with his monochromatic clothing and the way that the light filters across the image from the left.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Tulips

Spring is such a wonderful time to play with colour.  I saw these tulips in someone else’s garden in Nanaimo and as I got a little closer I noticed the beautiful, striking, red fringe on the edge of the petal.  As I stood there the background was the light purple flowers that you see at the bottom of the frame.  I didn’t like this as much so I got down low and background became dark green foliage that I threw out of focus with a 3.5 aperture.  There was a very distracting light coloured branch above the flower on the far right and I cloned it out but I am still not very good with the clone brush and I feel like you can tell I was messing with it.  I wanted a gradation of tone in the background so I took the image into Viveza and darkened the portion of the background that was above the flowers.  This way the out of focus purple flowers, instead of being a distraction are a part of the background tone transition from light at the bottom to darker at the top with the tulips taking up a very striking intermediary space.

I have another treatment of tulips here and some other flowers here and here.​

www.seeingberg.com

The Space in His Head

Lentzer walked slowly through the park.  He had been this way before, many times.  It was the place he went when his headed needed space to breathe, when the confusion that circled inside of him now would often begin to untangle itself.  Not today.  The tangled knots remained and his head remained a claustrophobic space; a small closed room on hot summer day.  His thoughts could not get space to breathe.  He kicked through the carpet of fallen leaves on the grass and moved on maybe he needed to sit by the stream.

The vibrant colours of the fallen autumn leaves presented a compelling study in colour.  The leaves had fallen out of a single maple tree and they were scattered around.  I knew that I wanted a photograph that had a field of view that was completely dominated by this red orange colour so I had to move myself around to get a perspective that had nothing in the background.  Sometimes we photographers get lazy when we say things like “there was nothing I could do about it, that power pole was in the frame.”  We decide what is in the frame, we decide where we are standing, what is in focus, what lens to use, and where we point the camera.  If we aren’t happy with what is in the frame then we need to move, crop, change lens, or change aperture.  The photograph that we take is all of ours and everything in it is there because we have chosen to let it remain there.

-Russell Berg

Death of A Leaf

A leaf dies slowly on the tree, it’s decay an amazing mixture of colour and form. Fuji X10 at 7mm f/2 1/1000 ISO 400

I continued wandering through Beban Park and saw this leaf just barely clinging to the tree and dying in such a beautiful display.  I loved the way that the colour and form, especially the negative space formed by the parts of the leaf that had already decayed to be especially interesting.  The light was so bright, however, that it was hard to distinguish the background from the foreground when I took the photo and I knew that this picture had a lot of potential but that it was going to require some work in post.  After importing the image into Aperture I increased the saturation slightly and started to play with ways to pull the leaf off of the background.  I increased the definition and this helped to make the edges more distinct but it still needed more so I burned in the photo on the edges and the parts of the background that showed through the holes in the leaf to darken it.  This got me part of the way there but the colours were still so bright on the edges so I applied a gamma vignette that desaturated and darkened the edges some more.  I applied a little more burn in to the holes in the leaf and it was there.  The treatment added a lot of depth to the image and allowed this wonderful leaf to stand out from the background.

-Russell Berg