Snow Day

We had a snow day this week where school was cancelled and I decided to dedicate the day to photography.  This is my journey that day.  I went out early to the marina because I love the idea of boats with snow, there’s a juxtaposition there that I think is interesting.  I got down really low on the dock and hung my camera over the edge with a wide angle lens to place the boats in a dominant position in the frame with the snowy trees to form the background.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm 1/1250 f/3.5 ISO 1250

I kept walking around the marina and I saw a place where the snow had fallen into the water in front of a sail boat.  I was sticking with my wide angle 10-22mm at its widest to play with the angles of the floating snow against the angles of the bow of the boat.  I felt like there were some interesting relationships there.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF-S 10-22mm at 13mm 1/1000 f/4 ISO 3200

As I was packing up my car to leave the marina, I saw the snow plow go by on Stewart Ave.  I thought to myself, what image says snow day more than a snow plow so I raced off after the plow.  They stopped in a nearby parking lot so I went up to them and asked if I could take their picture and where would they be plowing next?  They told me that they were heading up 19A but had a few repairs to do.  I went up the road, parked my car and got out to wait for them.  30 minutes of standing beside the road later I was paid off with this image as the truck roared by.  I did get soaked but it was so worth it.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF-S 10-22mm at 21mm 1/1250 f/4.5 ISO 2500

From there I started driving around some neighbourhoods just watching for interesting photographs and I found this older gentleman shovelling his sidewalk.  I went up to him and we had a little conversation and asked if I could photograph him while he worked.  He was fine with that, such a nice man with a face full of character and we had an interesting conversation afterwards.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF-S 10-22mm at 21mm 1/1250 f/4.5 ISO 2500

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF 70–200mm + 2x at 292mm 1/12500 f/5.6 ISO 200

Later in the afternoon, after the sun came out I thought I might get some good photos of the sea lions down at Duke Point as the sun went down.  The quality of the light is so key in making a good photograph and the low winter sunset produced some beautiful light.  In my boat as I headed out there I crossed paths with a large freighter.  I loved the contrast in colours and the striking lines created by the anchor chain, it’s shadow and the other anchor in the background.  I waited until Snake Island drifted into view in the background and got this image.

Canon EOS 7D Mk II EF 70–200mm at 200mm 1/1000 f/2.8 ISO 100

My timing with the light was just about perfect as the sun began to disappear over the horizon just as I was finishing my photographs of the sea lions.  The golden light plays over their dark brown fur to create some really beautiful colours.

That was my snow day, I had a blast.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Glacier

A young woman approaches the enormous mass of the Columbia Ice Fields. Canon EOS XSi EF-S 17-85 at 17mm f/4 1/400 ISO 200 -1ev

A Cruel Beauty

A broken piece of ice juts up into the sunset on a frozen prairie lake. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 at 20mm f/11 1/1000 ISO 400The cold hits your face like a physical force.  You gasp and breathe in and the temperature of the air assaults your lungs.  You take a couple of quick halting breaths and you begin to find your equilibrium.  You are of course dressed for it but the cold is a force in nature that is relentless and inexorable.  It finds the gaps in your clothing and begins to steal the heat away from you.  You breathe deep now and find that your growing accustomed to the discomfort of the air in your lungs and you exhale in a cloud of water vapour in front of your face.  Some of it begins to cling to your eyelashes and soon there will be small ice crystals hanging from each one.  Sometimes, it is difficult to open your eyes all the way.  You begin to walk and the polyester fabric of your jacket crinkles and rustles as you force it to move from it's cold stiffened position.  You glance at the thermometer as you walk past the corner of the house. -37 degrees celsius.

It wasn't that cold when I took this picture, (maybe -15 or -20), but a I wanted a photograph that expressed some of the cruel beauty of our winters in Canada.  The ice on this lake had shifted and cracked on to itself and pushed upwards into the air.  It formed a wonderful counterpoint to the sunset as it fell across the lake.  You have to be careful when backlighting a subject that it doesn't go really dark but luckily, in this case, the ice was translucent enough to let enough light through to preserve the detail in it's form.  There were quite a few specks of dirt in the ice so I cloned them out in Aperture.

-Russell Berg

Ice and Sky

At sunset on a prairie lake the ice picks up some wonderful colours. Fuji X10 7mm at f/3.6 1/500 ISO 200

Away on the horizon there is a thin, almost insignificant line.  A demarcation zone, a transition only; not a place to go but a place to travel through.  Being alone on the ice with the giant bowl of heaven all above the idea of a terrestrial life fades into a the background for a moment and that line of trees in the the distance is only a border between ice and sky.

I had just spent a couple of afternoon hours on the lake photographing the snow and ice and I was rewarded with a wonderful prairie sunset.  It was quite far north so sunset happened at 4:30.  As it began the colours of the snow and ice faded from white to yellow to blue to this wonderful purple and I knew that the foreground needed to be the focus of the photo so I put the horizon near the top third and underexposed by one stop to emphasize the colours.  I did punch up the saturation a little in Aperture afterwards.

-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.