Spaces in the Dawn

A dramatic dawn breaking over the shoreline in Victoria. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4 at 22mm f/5 1/2500 ISO 400She has come to this place before and it holds a special kind of honour in her mind.  She is alone yet she feels protected, she feels comforted yet her mind has space to roam and think.  The light plays and dances in her hair as it slowly reveals the rest of the world around her and lights her face with an amber glow.  Her thoughts pause for a moment and she breathes deep into the world around her.  Now... now she is ready.

I was recently in Victoria and as my wife slept in the hotel I went out to enjoy the sunrise.  Sunrise is a magical time for photographers, slowly the world is revealed to you and the quality of the light is like nothing else.  The light itself is so beautiful, you really just need to point your camera somewhere.  In this case I was struck by the line of clouds that draws the viewers eye in at the top of the frame and pulls it downward towards the whispy little formations at the left.  It almost seemed to me that the clouds where trying to hold back the light and it makes for a dramatic image.

The Edge

The rocky shoreline at Neck Point, Nanaimo. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 75-300 f/4-5.6 at 190mm f/5 1/400 ISO 100

The hard edge of the shore can be an unforgiving place. It is a place of power and danger where waves of unimaginable strength break themselves on the rocks . It is also a place that teems with life of so many different kinds, the kind of place where life began. It seems a place, to us humans, very hostile and dangerous; and yet so much of what we are and who we have become starts and ends at the shore.

The interplay of shape and form in large landscapes is always something that has interested me. I was walking walking around NeckPoint in Nanaimo and I was trying to see in Black and White. Sometimes it is easier to see the form and shape of a thing if you see it without colour. Colour can be very distracting. The camera compresses three dimensions into two, sometimes that is frustrating and sometimes it makes this image. This photo has three long horizontal bands that are compressed on top of each other and give the image an energy that wasn't there even as I looked at the place in real life.

-Russell Berg