Asleep At The Airport

She is uncertain. They are leaving the country together for the first time and he has never been off of the small island where he grew up.  Their flight is very early and they have had to be at the airport since 4:00am. That meant getting up shortly after 3.  His head flopped backwards and he fell asleep almost immediately.  Rosa has closed her eyes but the arm rest of the next seat is digging into her back and the uncertainty of how he will deal with all of the difficulties of living in Vietnam for a year is weighing on her.  She is wondering for the 37th time whether this is a good idea.  She isn’t sure how he will deal with not having hot water, or intermittent electricity, or the smells, or the crush of humanity in the city streets.  He is a good man but this is something completely new.

My wife and I were at recently at the airport very early in the morning and I saw this young couple sleeping over on the next bench.  I got out my camera because their posture told a very interesting story about their lives and about air travel.  I wasn’t, however, completely sure that that everyone would catch on that this was taken in an airport so I grabbed my wife’s suitcase, extended the handle and used it to help complete the story.  It also provides a nice frame for the girl’s face and provides some depth and visual interest to the foreground.

-Russell Berg

That Peculiar Silence

A headshot that I took of an intense young actor with remarkable blue eyes. Canon EOS 7D 50mm f/1.4 at f/5.6 1/200 ISO 400The young actor steps into the light.  She feels the warmth of it touch her cheeks, she feels the boards under her feet, she hears that peculiar silence of 200 pairs of eyes watching her, and she feels their anticipation.  The theatre is old and battered, a thousand different actors have walked these same boards and felt these same things.  She can feel their eyes watching her too.  She takes two steps to the right, downstage centre right, and breathes deep and slow.  It is time... to tell her story.

I teach theatre and I always take headshots of my actors as we prepare to perform.  I knew that I wanted to do something to accentuate the red hair and blue eye of this young lady.  I felt like putting her in a pose that was looking up at me, partially through her hair would draw the viewers eye in dramatically.  I was using two off camera flashes using Cactus V4 radio triggers to light her.  The key, at camera right, was in a shoot-through umbrella and was at a slightly higher power than the one at camera left.  I wanted fairly even light but this did produce a small amount of shadow.  Both lights were set low enough and the background was far enough back so that it went to full black.  I also made a slight increase to the saturation levels of her eyes and hair in Aperture.

-Russell Berg

Below is the picture I took just before the image above.  I feel like the two of them tell a bit of a story.

On This Day

A Woman sets the laundry out to dry in Papua, Indonesia The woman walks to the fence with a heavy load of washing to dry.  On this day she has already walked miles to collect wood for the fires, prepared sweet potatoes for the family, tended the gardens and washed these clothes she now carries.  It is a day like any other; it is 10 am and the rest of her work day lies in front of her.  There is an exhaustion that lies deep within her but that exhaustion has come to define her and the strength in her hands, the perseverance in her spirit keeps her moving.

When we lived in Papua, Indonesia we spent some time in the interior in an area called Pyramid.  I was wondering around one morning and I came across this very interesting fence.  They make their fences with almost a thatched roof on top.  This prevents some of the water from reaching the fence and slowing down the process of rot.  I followed the fence for a while and up ahead I saw this woman putting out her wash.  I loved the way that the fence draws your eye to the splash of colour represented by the woman and her clothes and the way that the tree frames the other side of the image.

-Russell Berg

Life Still Courses

Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85 f/4-5.6 at 85mm f/11 1/250 ISO 100 This older lady wandered into view on the Victoria Breakwater and I just had to have a picture of her amazing face.

There is a woman who walks down the pier.  She does so slowly and with a deliberation forced on her by the pain in her joints and the weakness in her knees.  This is not the tragic story of a dancer whose knees gave out on her or a singer who lost it all.  She was not a dancer or a singer, she did not once command the attention of great audiences.  She raised a family, she washed clothes, she made meals and now her body betrays her.  Her husband has been dead many years and even though her step is slow and her heart is many times heavy she still moves with purpose and will.  Life still courses in her veins.  She looks up to see the sails of the boat in the distance fill with wind and snap and surge and she smiles.

I was walking with my daughter on the Victoria Breakwater and on our way back we decided to walk on the quarried stone below instead of on the walkway proper.  It was a beautiful sunny day and there were several scuba divers heading out.  As we were walking I saw an older lady approaching us on the walkway above.  I knew that the concrete was going to be in the frame so I quickly decided to make it a design element, using it to bisect the frame diagonally.  I also had to move quickly because she was going to see me soon and I didn't want her expression to change if she saw me.  Her face had an amazing quality in it with so many wonderful stories in the lines, I wish I could have talked to her.

-Russell Berg

Life In The Lines

A delightful old man with a lot of life drawn into the lines of his face. Canon 7D, EFS 50mm 1.4 at f2.8 1/60, ISO 400A Perfect Photographic Morning Part 3

After I had climbed down off of the scaffolding, ignoring a few strange stares, (see previous post), I headed towards the mall because I wanted to cut through to go to a waffle restaurant that I wanted to have breakfast in.  I paused for a moment, and a thought occurred to me, “nothing interesting ever happened in a mall, this morning is about ‘interesting.’”  I kept walking, heading around the block.  I had walked about 15 steps and I looked to my left and there I saw a most interesting face, I thought, man I would like to photograph him, so I screwed up my courage, walked in and asked him if he would mind if I took some pictures of him.  He laughed, asked if these pictures were going in Penthouse.  I took some photos as she cut his hair moving around them but my favourite image was this one, he was laughing most of the time but I love the slightly wry smile that he is giving here, the heavily lidded eyes that have seen so much of life. I like the old newspaper clippings and old photos taped on to the mirror and the busy countertop.  How much more interesting this was than walking past the Gap.

-Russell Berg