Peering In

I have to admit I was playing with shallow depth of field because I had just bought a fast 50mm lens.  I was looking for only the thinnest slices of focus and playing with that technique often at the expense of the image.  I believe, however, that when you get a new piece of equipment or learn a new technique that it is important to play with it in a kind of obsessive way as long as you can eventually pull back and find the best ways to use that technique or equipment.  I suspect that this image would have been stronger if I had allowed the beam and the bold in the foreground to remain in focus.  I do, however, really like the way your eye gets drawn into the frame.  There is a strong sense of depth and I find my mind wandering down that steel shaft into the frame to see what is hidden down there.  I like the indistinct, unknown nature of the photograph, we want to know, we want to see what’s there but we can’t.  It’s that tension that keeps us looking.

For a different look at this kind of farm equipment check here and here.​

-Russell Berg

Sunset Over Canola

A beautiful prairie sunset over a field of ripe canola. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 22mm f/5 1/250 ISO 200 -.67EV

I have returned to the prairies and although I love Vancouver Island and it has definitely become home for me there is something very special about the draw of these skies.  There is an openness here, a welcoming in the landscape that doesn’t try to overwhelm you the way that giant forests, towering mountains, or rushing rivers do.  You can simply ‘be’ here and there is a wonderful sense of self that grows in the solitude of those wide open spaces that helps you understand your place in the world.  You can pull in a breath, let it go and you understand a little more.

Getting an image that has a glowing sunset over a foreground that is not completely black can be a challenge and I am not sure that I have completely succeeded here.  I wanted a sweeping landscape that told more of a story than just the beautiful colours of a the sunset.  I wanted a sense of place and space that was evocative of the prairie in a special way.  I exposed for the sunset without letting the foreground canola go completely dark.  This is where the value of a RAW file comes into play.  I was able to use the dodge (lighten) tool in Aperture to paint in a lighter exposure and bring back the detail in the canola flowers.  In my experience it is better to expose for the highlights and then allow the software to pull the detail out of the dark areas of the photo.  They are there but the camera sensor cannot display them without a little help.  I then added a touch of the shadow tool to finish the job and increased the saturation to give the sunset a bit more punch. Below I have included a copy of the same image before I started doing any processing.

-Russell Berg

Ice and Sky

Fuji X10 7mm f9 at 1/1000 ISO 800 The subtlety of the colours on an ice-covered, winter lake is amazing.

During the holidays my family and I went back to the prairies to spend time with family.  Every time I go back I am struck by the skys.  I live now in the mountains and the forest and we are so often closed in from the sky.  There is something important and vital about being able to be alone with yourself in the middle of a giant sky that reaches down to the horizon on every side of you.  It gives you a sense of perspective that is lacking in the forest or in the shadow of a mountain. 

I am really enjoying my new camera.  The Fuji X10 has a leaf shutter so it is able to synch with the flash very reliably up to 1/1000 of a second and that means I can take pictures that are otherwise impossible.  In the photo above I was down on the ice pointing my camera directly into the sinking sun.  In normal circumstances that requires an exposure that would have thrown the ice and snow into deep shadow.  Either that or I allow the sun to blow out.  With the X10 I can keep my shutter speed high to keep detail in the sunset and use the flash to expose the snow and ice effectively.  I loved the geometric patterns in the ice and so I laid my flash down on the ice to my left and allowed the light to skitter across the ice and bounce off the snow bank on the left.  I really liked the way that it turned out.

-Russell Berg

Fuji X10 7mm f11 at 1/680 ISO 200 I love the way playing with perspective and a wide angle lens can make this relatively small formation seem much larger.

Links... To The Past

Old machinery rusting away in a field has always held a strong attraction for me. EOS Rebel XSi, EFS 50mm 1.4 at f/1.4, 1/750 ISO 200

On the first morning of our Stein Family Gathering at a ’30’s haying festival in rural Alberta I woke early and started wandering around the fields.  There was a lot of machinery from the era that was in use but there was also a long row of rusting hulks that had long ago finished their part in delivering food to our tables.  I really liked the grainy texture of the metal in the links of the chain and depth of field that an aperture of 1.4 gave me made that area of texture stand out in the frame.  I also liked the way that the angles of the machinery in the top right and bottom right converge in lines that draw your eye towards the chain and then the axle moving to the left pulls your eye out of the frame.  I processed the original RAW colour image in NIK Silver Efex Pro.  It helped to emphasize the grain structure in chain links and to deepen the shadows in the bottom right and the bottom right and top right.  Silver Efex Pro produces B&W images like nothing I have ever seen.

-Russell Berg