Round Sky

Windmills are a compelling landscape subject but I was looking for a different point of view that provided and interesting form and a compelling shape.  I place myself near the base of one of the windmills, got down on the ground and pointed my camera up.  The 10mm wide angle lens compressed and converged the lines of the windmills.  I was pretty happy with this but I wanted a way to emphasize the line and form of the image by removing the colour.  To the left is the progression of edits that I did to eventually get to the image I wanted.  The first one is the colour image that I got out of the camera and even though I shot it during a sunset the colours were not that interesting and I felt that they distracted from the form and shapes inherent in the image.  In the second image I did a high key conversion in Silver Efex Pro and I got a nice B&W image but I had lost the interesting circular shape in the sky.  I pulled back the brightness and increased the contrast but I ended up with an image that was completely dominated by the circular shape in the sky so I pulled back and found a middle ground.  I was happy with the shapes and lines so I decided to add a blue tint.  

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

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