Purple Tracks

During the summer time we were in Vernon for a weekend and I had seen an old barn with some character that I wanted to photograph at sunset.  The nearby hills cast the barn into shadow so I kept driving around looking for an interesting subject.  The light is everything.  If I had taken this picture at 2 in the afternoon I would have gotten washed out greens, a flat boring railroad track and some very grey rocks.  The light cutting down through all of that horizon in the evening makes the green and yellow come together in a fiery gold, the low slanting light hits the tracks and produces a reflection that pulls your eye into the photo.  The tracks also put the rocks into a light shadow allowing them to display their purple-blue colour.  When photographers go out at sunset or sunrise good things happen.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Sun

I hurried out to Neck Point on a May evening to catch the sunset.  I hurried around to a position so that I would be looking west over the water and discovered that I had a very striking background to a silhouette of some people who had also come out to watch the same sunset.  I snapped off a few quick ones and saw that the atmospheric conditions were giving a beautiful golden yellow glow to my pictures.  I began to watch for an interesting foreground moment with the people who were out in front watching the sun go down.  I was a long ways back so I wasn’t worried about them seeing me losing the natural body language of the moment but there was a sign in the way that kept getting into the frame.  I shifted around and finally the people moved off to the left.  I took quite a few pictures but there were two other moments that I really liked; the man and woman in the frame above sat at a picnic table and she leaned in towards him, (left), I really liked the body language in that moment.  The other one was of a group of younger people; they were standing and talking and watching and the sun caught very nicely in their hair, (bottom left).  In the end I liked the hopeful nature of the man standing, putting both his hands over his eyes and staring out into the sunset and the counterbalance on the left side of the frame that the silhouette of the tree provides.  The last element that really made the decision for me was the fact that I had closed down my aperture and produced a depth of field that produced a sharp foreground and maintained focus on the sunset.  The photo is really about the sun so having it dominate was pretty important.  A few minutes later I got a non-silhouetted image of two people watching the sunset, and, each other.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Lovers

I was wandering around Neck Point because I came to see the sunset and make some photographs. It was a beautiful warm evening with the sun dropping into the ocean in a beautiful warm glow.  The sun had gone down behind some clouds and the showy part of the sunset was over when I saw this couple alone  on the grass.  I circled behind them and snapped a few pictures from a distance.  He leaned forward to kiss her cheek and it was the perfect instance that defined their moment together.    It is a moment filled with little intimacies, the little tattoo behind her ear, his arm around her back and... the kiss.  With the the sun still glinting in the grasses around them it is a tender moment shared by two lovers with the ocean the mountains in the background.  Henri Cartier-Bresson, an amazing French photographer, talked about finding the decisive moment that defines a situation or a personality or a relationship.  I think this moment comes pretty close to matching Cartier-Bresson’s criteria.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Moonrise

Summer moonrise over Lake Okanagan. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm at 182mm f/5 1/320 ISO 100

Tilting at...

Silhouette windmills in a blood red sky. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm at 300mm f/5.6 1/4000 ISO 100

The energy of a whole planet originates in that flaming ball that slowly sinks towards the horizon.  It’s heat drives the wind currents that power these turbines feeding electricity into the wires.  The energy of all we do and all we become starts with the heat and light that travels all those miles of empty space and warms my cheek as I look up in the sky.

I am still out in the prairies and the other night I found out that there were windmills quite close to where I am staying.  I knew that I had to get out there to photograph them at sunset.  The main struggle was finding a decent location before the light disappeared so I was tearing up and down country roads to find a decent spot.  Of course I found the perfect spot after the light was gone but I am pretty happy with this one.  I knew that I wanted to underexpose to throw the windmills into silhouette so I took a couple of quick exposures in aperture priority to get a baseline exposure then switched over to manual.  The sky had a fair amount of dust in it I guess and when I underexposed I got this beautiful brilliant red.  I did not come up with this colour with heavy processing I did not even touch the saturation on the image, in fact I brightened it a little which lightened the red.  I love the way that the sun has a yellow band around it and the colours are so compelling even though the composition is a little off.

-Russell Berg