Purple Night

I recently took a solo boat trip down to DeCourcy Island and I was hoping to make some decent nighttime images.  I had been messing around on the other side of the island where my day time scouting had determined that I was going to get the best images, (turned out I couldn’t get anything good there), and was heading back to my dinghy when I saw a boat behind this old tree.  It was very dark out, almost 10:30, so it took a little bit of work to get myself and my tripod into a position to frame the boat between the two branches.  The wind was starting to come up so the fellow on the boat was going out to check the lines coming off his stern, (the green lights extending from the back of the boat are from his head lamp shining on the water as he paddle to shore).  I did four exposures of a minute each and I felt lucky that the boat was relatively sharp in this one as it was quite windy and I was sure that the motion would show up as blur.  Using a wide angle lens, 10mm, allowed me to get close to the tree and have it dominate the frame but even though the moon was out there wasn’t enough light on it so I lit it up with my flashlight during the long exposure.  I am quite happy with the result.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Purple Tracks

During the summer time we were in Vernon for a weekend and I had seen an old barn with some character that I wanted to photograph at sunset.  The nearby hills cast the barn into shadow so I kept driving around looking for an interesting subject.  The light is everything.  If I had taken this picture at 2 in the afternoon I would have gotten washed out greens, a flat boring railroad track and some very grey rocks.  The light cutting down through all of that horizon in the evening makes the green and yellow come together in a fiery gold, the low slanting light hits the tracks and produces a reflection that pulls your eye into the photo.  The tracks also put the rocks into a light shadow allowing them to display their purple-blue colour.  When photographers go out at sunset or sunrise good things happen.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Jellyfish

I wandered into the Vancouver Aquarium, not quite sure what to expect.  Very near the entrance was an entrancing exhibit of wonderfully beautiful, jellyfish. They were graceful, colourful, and elegant.  Getting a good image through the glass is not as difficult as you might think.  First of all it is very important to turn off your flash.  There were a number of people taking pictures with their phones using a flash and all that they got was a reflection of their flash in the glass.  Try and find a bit of glass that is relatively clean and get in nice and close.  This will limit the number of reflections that the sensor will pick up.  If you have a lens hood on put it right against the glass and you will get almost no reflections.  The room was dark so that helped eliminate distractions seen through the tank and I opened up to f.2.8 to throw the jellyfish in the background into a pleasant blur.  I love the way that vibrant purple provides a striking counterpoint to the ivory of the jellyfish bodies.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Flowers In The Mist

A dreamy purple flower in the morning mist. Canon EOS XSi EF 70-300mm at 300mm f/5.6 1/350 ISO 800 −1ev

I found this flower after wandering around the edges of a prairie slough on an early summer morning.  I caught a glimpse of it through the mass of green reeds and grasses.  I couldn’t get very close to it without getting wet but I was drawn by the contrast in colour and texture.  Everything was very soft. And the droplets of dew accentuated that.  I pulled out my telephoto zoom to pull the flower in close and I noticed the contrasting texture of the hair on the stems of the plant.  Normally I don’t like to have something obstructing my view of the main subject but I feel as though the out of focus stem of grass in the foreground adds to the sense of crowding and compression that was a part of the live scene.  Normally I don’t play much with filters or heavy post processing effects but in this case I applied some effects from Nik Colour Efex Pro and I was quite happy with the result.  

-Russell Berg

The same image after processing. Canon EOS XSi EF 70-300mm at 300mm f/5.6 1/350 ISO 800 −1ev