Eyes

When I came across these two young ladies and their very beautiful, striking eyes I knew that I wanted to do a portrait of the pair of them.  I wanted that portrait to be focused, with a laser like intensity on their eyes.  I also wanted both of their eyes to be in the same image and I wanted the viewers experience of the image to be dominated by their eyes.  Taking a portrait this close up means that the lighting has to be done carefully or the reflection coming back at you will be distracting.  I could have done it with natural light, I had a window right nearby but I wanted a dramatic intensity to the light that would punch up the image.  I had discovered a very cheap way to convert an off camera flash into a pretty decent ring light by a company called DIY Lighting Kits.  It’s kind of a folding plastic contraption that captures the light from your flash and reflects it outward in a ring.  I put the camera’s lens through the middle of the ring flash, dialled in the exposure manually to darken the background and shot away.  I wanted a dramatic intense look so I upped contrast and saturation in the eyes.  You have to be careful when doing this as you can really ruin the skin tone if you take it too far.  Viveza by Nik allows you to focus your adjustments on small areas, (like the blue of their eyes), and not ruin the rest of your image.  I also added a vignette to further darken the edges of the photograph.  

For a different lighting setup of another closeup portrait check out this image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

I also did a black and white version but settled on the colour because of the striking blue grey in both their eyes that has such a different character in each of them.

The only issue that I have is that I did not adjust the model on the bottom so that she was straight on to me.  Her head is very slightly tilted to her left and I wish that I had noticed this when I did the portraits.

Half

​The raw image that became the portrait above.

…or How to Fix A Portrait.  Wandering around firing off your camera without giving your image a lot of thought rarely turns out well but sometimes the circumstances do not allow for a great deal of thought until afterwards when you are sitting down with the image on the computer.  This week I am focusing on photos that I took during the last musical that I directed and this portrait of this young actor is one of them.  As you can see from the image to the right, the picture that came out of the camera was nothing special.  The young lady’s expression was so full of excitement and life, it carried so much anticipation that I really wanted to do something about the fact that I had completely ruined the composition by cutting off part of her face.  I often tell my young actors “if you make a mistake commit to it completely and people will think it is an artistic choice.”  So I decided to follow my own advice and instead of bemoaning the fact that I had ruined what could have been an interesting photograph I committed completely to my mistake and cut her face right in half.  There is something very compelling about that very striking single eye peering out at us from the image and I love how it turned out.  I warmed up the colour temperature and increased the saturation, especially of the greens and that brought out the green in her eyes.  I also increased the values on the black point to give a bit more drama to the lashes around her eye.  I did a little work on some minor skin blemishes because the cropping is so tight and when I was done I was very happy with the way my ‘mistake’ turned out.

-Russell Berg

Games With String

A little girl plays with string. Canon EOS XSi EF 50mm at f/3.5 1/80 ISO 200 −1ev

She leans back in the desk, a little mind filled with big ideas.  Her hands move quickly and without thought, cycling through the patterns and  movements of the cradle.  All the while her mind circles around and around.  She is lost in places I can never see, worlds I will never visit and the string is just a tool to keep her hands busy while her mind travels.

I spent some time with my brothers and their families last summer and a few of my nieces were using string to play ‘cats in the cradle’.  We all went to a museum together on a very hot day and this little girl sat down in a desk and leaned back.  I was immediately struck by the way that she was absently playing with the string while her eyes were a million miles away.  I watched for a moment and waited for her to turn her eye towards me.  When she did I snapped the picture.  There are moments for a person where we really get to see who they are.  Sometimes they are hidden in a momentary glance, they are fleeting; they are there and then gone but the camera sees them in a way that nothing else does.   

-Russell Berg

Through a Glass Darkly

A gorilla stares intently in the Seattle Zoo. Canon EOS XSi EF-S 75-300mm f/4-5.6 at 250mm f/5.6 1/45 ISO 800

His eyes stare out intently, not at me, not at someone else but out into the middle distance.  Out to the place in his hindbrain where the pack lived in lush tree covered hillsides.  Out to the place where his father was king and his family moved in freedom.  It is a dimly remembered reflection seen through a glass darkly but it is there, deep down in his DNA every cell in his body reminding him of what he could be.

Visiting a zoo is interesting and exciting but always a little sad.  The people who run the Seattle Zoo do a very good job at producing interesting and stimulating enclosures for the animals but still…  I wanted a photo that captured this tension and when I saw this gorilla I hoped I might catch it.  The zoo has thick glass windows that look into the gorilla’s den and this always produces issues of reflection and dirt on the glass.  The other concern was that it was quite dark in the area where I was shooting but there was just enough light for my lens to capture even thought the maximum aperture was only f/5.6.  After I got the image home I cloned out the reflections and dirt on the glass in Aperture.  Luckily these where mainly in the side of the photo that I wanted to go dark.  I  then exported into Nik Silver Efex Pro and darkened the left side of the photo.  I was really happy with the way that the texture of the skin came through and the way that the his face is in the borderland between dark and light.  It adds to the tension in the image of a wild thing not living in a place where he belongs. 

-Russell Berg

Screech

These beautiful peacocks in Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, let me get very close. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 at f/5.6 1/160 ISO 400

The colour of the bird hits me first, it is a blue so blue that it beggars description.  There is an almost incandescent, glowing quality to the blue and it changes colour ever so slightly as the feathers shift, then settle in the sun.  The bird is a riot of outrageous colours and flamboyant form.

I was wandering around Beacon Hill Park and I heard the screech of what I thought was a peacock.  I followed the sound and saw a couple of them sitting in trees beyond a fenced enclosure.  I tried to get a few shots from that distance but nothing was coming out very nicely.  I heard another screech and it was off in a different direction.  As I wondered towards the sound I saw one wandering around on the grass.  I moved in very slowly and began to snap away.  It was fairly early on a Sunday morning so there weren't alot of people around and the peacock seemed very tame.  It let me get quite close.  I was so focused on this bird so much that I didn't even notice the second peacock until it walked right past me within inches of brushing against me.  I spent about 20 minutes photographing the 3 or 4 birds that gathered around me.  It was very cool.  I was using a long lens 300mm so even though the aperture is only f/5.6 the background is thrown out of focus and I was able to get a nice clean background that doesn't distract from the wonderful feathers.

This peacock's stare was so inquisitive. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 at f/5.6 1/250 ISO 400