Round Sky

Windmills are a compelling landscape subject but I was looking for a different point of view that provided and interesting form and a compelling shape.  I place myself near the base of one of the windmills, got down on the ground and pointed my camera up.  The 10mm wide angle lens compressed and converged the lines of the windmills.  I was pretty happy with this but I wanted a way to emphasize the line and form of the image by removing the colour.  To the left is the progression of edits that I did to eventually get to the image I wanted.  The first one is the colour image that I got out of the camera and even though I shot it during a sunset the colours were not that interesting and I felt that they distracted from the form and shapes inherent in the image.  In the second image I did a high key conversion in Silver Efex Pro and I got a nice B&W image but I had lost the interesting circular shape in the sky.  I pulled back the brightness and increased the contrast but I ended up with an image that was completely dominated by the circular shape in the sky so I pulled back and found a middle ground.  I was happy with the shapes and lines so I decided to add a blue tint.  

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Slicing Dawn

​Apple's wallpaper image that was the inspiration for my photograph.

I was walking along the edge of a marsh just after dawn and I saw this tangle of thick grasses.  I was immediately reminded of Apple’s desktop wallpaper image of grass and Picasso’s dictum that good artist’s borrow but great artists steal.  I am no great artist but I decided to try and go for something similar with my own interpretation.  The grass that I was looking at seemed to cut and slice across the image and the form, line and shape of the image was more compelling to me when I took a wider shot than the one that Apple used.  Using a wider point of view also meant that we did not get as direct a view of the dew drops on the grass; instead the mist and dew drops become a soft counterpoint to the slicing horizontal lines of the grass.  The wider image also allowed me to include the transition from the dark regions below to the lightening sky at the top and I believe this improves my image.  The colour seemed to be getting in the way of, instead of complementing the image so I converted to black and white and was much happier with the result.

For more natural photographs with an abstract feel check here and here.​

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Open Rest

Dramatic prairie sky's darken as a storm breaks over a field of wheat. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm f/9 1/60 ISO 100

My wheels hum down the open highway as the wide prairie spaces open up in front of me.  This place has been called empty but for me it is not empty, it is open.  There is a beauty in the openness that invites you to examine yourself rather than overwhelm you with the ‘other’ that surrounds you.  There is space to breath and think.  The prairies are like the rest between the notes, the pause in the well crafted sentence, the negative space that defines the image.  They are the place where we can understand the rest of our lives because for the moment we can consider the rest of our lives with spaces for the thoughts to breath.

One more from my trip to the prairies.  I went out for a bike ride in the early morning and as I got closer to home the wind started to whip up and the sky started to darken in the south.  I love a dramatic prairie sky over a sunlit wheat field and I went back out with my car to find the right angle under the right sky.  I got this image but I knew that I had to do some work on it.  The sensor on my 7D does not have the dynamic range to cover the variation in light and darkness in the image.  I exposed for the highlights and then went to work on the image in Aperture.  I really liked the ‘U’ shaped ring of dramatic clouds so I emphasized this  by brushing in more contrast to the edges of the ‘U’ where they bordered the softer clouds.  I then darkened the softer clouds in the middle of the frame near the horizon line.  Next was the wheat.  I painted in light with the dodge tool in Aperture and then added saturation to the yellow-greens of the wheat.  I was quite happy with the drama that resulted.

-Russell Berg  

Tilting at...

Silhouette windmills in a blood red sky. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm at 300mm f/5.6 1/4000 ISO 100

The energy of a whole planet originates in that flaming ball that slowly sinks towards the horizon.  It’s heat drives the wind currents that power these turbines feeding electricity into the wires.  The energy of all we do and all we become starts with the heat and light that travels all those miles of empty space and warms my cheek as I look up in the sky.

I am still out in the prairies and the other night I found out that there were windmills quite close to where I am staying.  I knew that I had to get out there to photograph them at sunset.  The main struggle was finding a decent location before the light disappeared so I was tearing up and down country roads to find a decent spot.  Of course I found the perfect spot after the light was gone but I am pretty happy with this one.  I knew that I wanted to underexpose to throw the windmills into silhouette so I took a couple of quick exposures in aperture priority to get a baseline exposure then switched over to manual.  The sky had a fair amount of dust in it I guess and when I underexposed I got this beautiful brilliant red.  I did not come up with this colour with heavy processing I did not even touch the saturation on the image, in fact I brightened it a little which lightened the red.  I love the way that the sun has a yellow band around it and the colours are so compelling even though the composition is a little off.

-Russell Berg

Poplar

A row of poplar trees on the prairies. Canon EOS XSi EF-S 17-85 f/4-5.6 at 30mm f/5.6 1/125 ISO 200

I was wandering around some fields in northern Alberta when I came across this grove of poplar trees. The strong vertical lines of the trees against the dark background was striking. I took the photo and decided to frame it with a strong horizontal crop. The fact that the photo is horizontal makes your eye pull across the strong vertical lines of the image like a boy running a stick across the slats of a wooden picket fence. There is more energy in the image than if I had framed it with a vertical crop.