Sometimes Red...

Sometimes red is just red and sometimes it is blood and passion and loyalty.  Sometimes red is the heat of anger, the all encompassing compulsion of love, the binding rage of jealousy.  But sometimes red… is just red.

One fall I was walking around taking photos of the beautiful foliage and on impulse I picked up one leaf that I thought was particularly beautiful and I carried it around all over town taking pictures of it in different circumstances.  (See another example of a portrait of this leaf here.)  The leaf had such a wonderful colour and vein structure that I wanted an image that would really emphasize these two characteristics so I looked for a place where I could place it so that it would appear alone against the backdrop of the high sky.  I twisted the stem around a small branch that was hanging down above me, composed so that you couldn’t see any other branches and took the picture underexposing a little.  I pumped up the saturation levels a little and increased the contrast to give the red some real punch.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Oranges In The Light

A high key still life of oranges and pomegranates. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85mm at 65mm f/6.3 1.250

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.

-Edouard Manet

I have always liked the effect of producing high key still life images and I wanted to try and produce one myself.  I set up a white background on our kitchen table and pulled out some fruit and a white plate.   I started with setting up a manual exposure on the camera that would eliminate all ambient light.  Basically I took pictures without flash and reduced the exposure until the picture was almost black, this indicates that there is no ambient light hitting the sensor.  Then I started to add flash.  In order to make the background disappear. I had to put a significant amount of light on it.  The background itself was not pure white, it was an off-white linen kind of material I increased the power on the flash until the background turned pure white and the texture disappeared.  Then I added another flash below the camera pointing directly at the fruit.  I had a small fabric lightbox on this flash and I increased the power until I got nice highlights from the orange.  Overall I was pretty happy but I would like to have been able to eliminate the shadows in the foreground.

-Russell Berg

Wild Eyes

A white wolf's piercing stare. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm at 300mm f/7.1 1/400 ISO 200

The gaze of a wild thing is something compelling and driven.  It pulls us back to a time only remembered deep in our hindbrain, to a world where our survival depended on understanding these eyes.  And now… now we live in a world that isolates us from the wild and to experience something so vital and primal can be a wonderful experience.

We sometimes forget to consider textures when we are working in a visual medium but textures, even though they are presented visually can have a significant impact on the ways in which the image is perceived.  As I was taking this photo I started with the contrast of the rough old log to the soft almost luxurious fur.  The textural contrast was enhanced by the contrast in colour.  I had never seen a white wolf before but it was very beautiful.  There was also the smooth texture of the tree trunk behind the wolf and the soft out of focus area to the right of the wolf.  There are a lot of textures going on and it helps to build interest in the photograph.

-Russell Berg

When Light Curves

Playing with light on a beautiful white vase. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85 at 30mm f/8 1/250 ISO 100

The curve and line of the thing pulls my hand to it.  Every time I see it I want to touch it.  I is light and cool with a milky form that invites inspection and exploration.  Even all on it's own, just sitting there on the table it seems to absorb the light in the way that a white thing should not.  It is a beautifully made thing.

One afternoon during Christmas vacation I decided to pull out my lights and photography this vase.  My wife buys vases, alot of vases but this one in particular I really like.  The shape and texture of the thing where made to have light playing against it.  I set up on a tripod in front of the kitchen table and draped some black fabric over a chair that I had put on top of the table.  This was my very "high tech" studio.  I started by setting an exposure that would completely kill the ambient light, (my first frames where completely black), then I started layering in light.  For this image I used 2 flashes that where mounted off camera and triggered by Cactus V4 strobes, (very inexpensive and very reliable with fresh batteries).  The camera left flash was set at 1/32 power and mounted on a light stand and had a small, 6"x4", light box velcroed to it.  I wanted the light to be softer coming from the left but I didn't want the full wrap around that an umbrella would provide.  I really wanted the camera right side of the vase to be brightly lit and yet to maintain an area of shadow to emphasize the three- dimensionality and shape of the vase.  I put a homemade cardboard snoot ala David Hobby on my second flash and held it at extreme camera right with very low power, 1/64 or 1/128.  It turned out that I needed a pretty extreme angle to get the effect I was looking for.  The snooted flash is behind the vase pointing back at the camera at a slight angle so that the flash head is visible in the uncropped frame.  I knew I wanted a square composition so the flash was going to get cropped out anyway.  It was very cool to be able to paint the light the way I wanted it to look.

-Russell Berg

Below is another shot that I took without the snooted flash at camera right.  I like this one too especially the way that the left edge of the vase is well defined and the right edge falls away into shadow.