The Plaka: A Photo Essay Part 1

I had dropped my bags grabbed some supper and my wide angle lens and went to explore how this area of Athens was going to photograph. I had walked down a fairly commercial street filled with American stores and I came smack up against this beauty. When a building starts to fall down the Athenians put these upper railings/deflector walls I think to prevent the pedestrians below from getting clunked on the head. It was a building of such character and my eye got pulled down the alley to the right to continue my exploration.

Exploring The Dry Dock

The Nanaimo Boatyards is home to a remarkable old building that holds a dry dock for large boats to come in and get some maintenance done.  I don’t know how old it is but is there ever a lot of character in the building.  The textures and tones were so interesting and they were all the more so when I converted the image to black and white.  As I was looking at the image at full magnification when I began to prepare this post I realized that I may have had more than one image here.  There were little stories that the picture was telling throughout the building so I cropped in tight on some of the interesting areas.  Check them out below, you definitely give away some resolution but I think the results are pretty interesting.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Jumanji in Vancouver: Inspired by Callahan Part 1

I was in Vancouver and I had just been to the Vancouver Art Gallery and seen an exhibit of Harry Callahan, a dynamic and fascinating street photographer who worked mainly in the ’30-’60’s and I was feeling inspired by what I had seen.  I was at a cycling race and of course I was taking pictures of the race when what was happening across the street from me drew my focus more clearly and I realized I had something far more interesting.  The background was formed by this wonderful convenience store/hotel whose lights both inside and outside the building form a nice counterpoint to the human interaction out front.  There were two couples on either side of the frame, the lady who was drinking and the Jumanji looking guy in the centre of it all.  I noticed a little girl walking by and I waited until she was in a gap in the people and took the picture.  I lucked out in that the two couples where engaged with each other in a really dynamic way and the lady took a drink just at that moment, and of course, the star of the photo is the guy in the pith helmet and the cane.  Without him the photo would have had less of a story to tell and sometimes you just get lucky. 

Layers

I was out walking through downtown Nanaimo looking for ways to introduce depth into a two dimensional image, looking for images that pulled the eye into the frame.  I am drawn to subjects that speak of urban decay, of a place that had once been brimming with life and energy but now was left only a shell.  I came across this window that wrapped around a triangular shaped building that was partly covered with paper left after the tenant moved out.  This image brought both of these things together. The portion of the window that was covered reflected the street behind me, I could see through the middle section of the window, to the street on the other side but the second window picked up more reflections at a different angle.  It all worked together to give about 6 different views of the street behind me and the street in front of me.  I had to work hard to find the right position so that I would not become part of the image.  I really like the way that the layers of glass produced and almost double exposure effect for portions of the frame.  There is a lot of see in this image but I am especially drawn to the way that the street light pole is repeated in a shadowy reflection and the vague idea of a person in the deep background.

Looking down into the pillared entry of a courtyard. Canon EOS 7D Mk. II EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.6 1/80 ISO 250

Earlier that same grey morning I had come across this location and I really had to hunt to find the right angle from which to shoot it.  It is near the China Steps in Nanaimo and getting above the arches gave them a more interesting appearance.  I leaned against the wall in the extreme right of the frame to anchor the image.  I used an extremely large aperture, f/1.6, to push the wall out of focus and dark out of focus portion of the right side of the frame provides a contrast to the crisp shapes of the arches and brick patio and fence beyond.  The light and the light coloured tiles pull the eye deep into the frame, away from the dark anchor on the left.  I also darkened the edges of the frame and lightened the centre portion of the arches so that your eye would be pulled deep into the centre of the frame both by what’s in focus, and by where the light is. Finding ways to introduce depth into, what essentially is, a flat medium can really add interest to your photographs.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Fixing The Window

I stood in the parking lot of a 7-11 looking at this house.  I had been out driving around looking for interesting images and this house grabbed my eye, I had done a u-turn at the next intersectionand now I had to figure out how to make the image.  I felt as though the house needed to have a very straightforward angle, nothing fancy, so I chose to shoot it straight on, so the viewer could only see the front wall of the house.  It felt almost as though this is what would have been drawn in the set director’s sketchbook when the scene from the movie called for a rundown house with some character so I wanted it to look, as much as possible like a facade so I shot it straight on.  I was also pretty sure that I wanted to end up with a square frame, I felt that it fit the visual language of the house so now I just had to choose which side of the house put on the edge of the frame.  The rather lifeless looking tree on the right side, fit into the frame better than the spruce trees on the left and they added to the mood and tone that already existed in the house.  I was also pretty sure, right from the start that the house needed to be slightly off-centre so all of these ideas came together in the composition that you see here.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Paul leaned forward on the ladder his position, somewhat precarious.  He felt the old gutter pipe bend and give a little more as he leaned forward.  The stairwell window had been leaking and there was now a brown stain on the plaster on the the inside wall.  He had watched the stain grow every time he climbed the stairs to his room over the last two months.  He had noticed it when it was just a small semi-circle under the moulding around the window but now it was overlapping layers of brown streaks running from the edge of the window to the floor.  In some ways it had marked the passage of time in his life better than the calendar, better than the schedule at his job assembling fences at construction sites, better than the mounting number of days that had passed since he had last spoken to his father.  But now, now it was time to fix it, now it was time to put a fresh layer of caulk around each pane.  This might stop the water from making the stain grow, but it wouldn’t stop the unending rows of construction fencing and it for sure would not make his father pick up the phone.  But… it would stop the leak.