An Eye To The Sky

You wander around faced with an abundance of wonderful subjects, good access, and unusual wildlife so taking pretty pictures happens as long as you've got a modicum of focus and some basic skills.  However, making a good image with something to say is another thing entirely.  Finding the moment in the passing minutes is often like dipping your cup into a rushing river to find one particular drop of water.  Sometimes it happens because you are watching intently and with great purpose, sometimes it happens by accident.  

I took probably 15 images of this White-Naped Crane at the Seattle Zoo but there was one, this one, that seemed to have something to say.  His neck arches gracefully against the blurred green background, light and shadow play agains the curve of his neck, his eye seems to be searching for something lost, something that he once knew.  It's really all about patience, capturing this moment meant waiting beside the  crane exhibit until this bird showed me who he was.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Sometimes Red...

Sometimes red is just red and sometimes it is blood and passion and loyalty.  Sometimes red is the heat of anger, the all encompassing compulsion of love, the binding rage of jealousy.  But sometimes red… is just red.

One fall I was walking around taking photos of the beautiful foliage and on impulse I picked up one leaf that I thought was particularly beautiful and I carried it around all over town taking pictures of it in different circumstances.  (See another example of a portrait of this leaf here.)  The leaf had such a wonderful colour and vein structure that I wanted an image that would really emphasize these two characteristics so I looked for a place where I could place it so that it would appear alone against the backdrop of the high sky.  I twisted the stem around a small branch that was hanging down above me, composed so that you couldn’t see any other branches and took the picture underexposing a little.  I pumped up the saturation levels a little and increased the contrast to give the red some real punch.

-Russell Berg

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

Photographing Glass

Eliminating reflections in glass can be a challenge. Canon EOS 7D 50mm at f/4 1/60 ISO 200

My wife makes stained glass stepping stones and she was looking for a way to market them online so I set out to photograph them. While I wouldn't call product shots high art photography they did provide and interesting challenge. It was a typical dark Nanaimo afternoon and I knew I wanted a bright well lit image to show off the deep rich colours of the glass. I started with a a flash mounted on the camera because I was feeling lazy and hoping that ETTL would give me a nice image. That didn't work, I got huge reflections. I was standing directly over the stones looking down at them so I kept the flash on the camera but bounced the light off of white shoot through umbrella that I placed on the other side of the stone. The umbrella was angled down towards the stone and while this did provide a larger more diffuse light source it did not completely eliminate my reflection issues. Finally I twigged to the idea that the light was bouncing straight back into the lens and that I needed to give it a path that still hit the stone but would not bounce back straight to the lens. I set up an umbrella with a flash in it on either side of the stone so that the main light would hit the glass and bounce off to the side leaving a reflectionless image. It worked. If you want to see more of the images check hit the Stained Glass link at the top of the page

-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