I Was Chiefly Speaking of... Flowers

My wife and I went out for a little walk yesterday and a spring walk for a photographer holds all kinds of delights.  The challenge is to find new and interesting ways to present them.  I decided that I wanted to play with large open areas of sky in my compositions To make the flowers a counterpoint to the large blocks of blue colour.  In this image I liked the contrast between the blue block of colour on the left and the dark branches on the right that still hold just the budding promise of the coming spring.  The flowers hold the middle ground in this image.  In Lightroom I increased the structure and the contrast then I took the image into Photoshop and used Content Aware Spot Healing Brush to remove three power lines.  Then I took the image into Viveza and darkened the blue sky on the left. 

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

A canopy of cherry blossoms against a blue sky.  Fuji XE-2 XF 14mm 2.8 at f/6.4 1/400 ISO 400

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

The Glass Museum: A Short Photo Essay 3

This last image brings the geometry of the cone into focus as well as emphasizing the way that the light plays on on the stainless steel tiles.  The other images tend to emphasize the unity of the tiles but here I underexposed the image and increased the contrast and texture to the point where we can see the different ways that the light interacts with the materials on the cone.  The lighter centre and the darker edges give the image depth and we get a better sense of it’s shape.  The small aperture maintains focus as you look out to the clouds.  As you have seen in the last three images I am always looking for ways to increase contrast so I framed the shot to include the concrete wall and I increased the black point until the shape at the top of the wall almost looked like a hole cut into the cone.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Dragon's Watch

Original, unedited photo

The wind, the rain, and the ocean sometimes do a wonderful job to produce some very interesting erosion patterns in the driftwood.  This large stump had been hollowed out form the middle.  I squeezed myself into the middle of this stump with my wide angle lens to get the feeling of a dragon coiled around me.  I loved the way that the root in the middle looked like a dragon’s head (1) that was looking out to the sky.  I wanted to give the dragon something to look at so I brightened the sky so that it would appear as though the dragon was looking out to the sunset (2).  There were going to be a couple of issues with the photograph though.  I wanted to keep everything in focus from the wood 10 cm in front of my lens (3) to the island 5km away on the horizon (4).  A wide angle lens will naturally help keep more of the frame in focus but I also stopped down my aperture to f/10.  The second issue was the huge dynamic range that I was dealing with.  The sky and the background was very bright and the foreground was in deep shadow.  No one exposure could take in that variation in brightness, not without some manipulation.  If I had exposed for the shadowy logs, the sky would be too bright, If I exposed for the sky the logs would be black.  I shot a medium exposure and that leaned towards the highlights and took it in to Nik HDR.  That program does some serious digital voodoo and pulled the detail out of the logs.  

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

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