A young woman approaches the enormous mass of the Columbia Ice Fields. Canon EOS XSi EF-S 17-85 at 17mm f/4 1/400 ISO 200 -1ev
A Cruel Beauty
A broken piece of ice juts up into the sunset on a frozen prairie lake. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 at 20mm f/11 1/1000 ISO 400The cold hits your face like a physical force. You gasp and breathe in and the temperature of the air assaults your lungs. You take a couple of quick halting breaths and you begin to find your equilibrium. You are of course dressed for it but the cold is a force in nature that is relentless and inexorable. It finds the gaps in your clothing and begins to steal the heat away from you. You breathe deep now and find that your growing accustomed to the discomfort of the air in your lungs and you exhale in a cloud of water vapour in front of your face. Some of it begins to cling to your eyelashes and soon there will be small ice crystals hanging from each one. Sometimes, it is difficult to open your eyes all the way. You begin to walk and the polyester fabric of your jacket crinkles and rustles as you force it to move from it's cold stiffened position. You glance at the thermometer as you walk past the corner of the house. -37 degrees celsius.
It wasn't that cold when I took this picture, (maybe -15 or -20), but a I wanted a photograph that expressed some of the cruel beauty of our winters in Canada. The ice on this lake had shifted and cracked on to itself and pushed upwards into the air. It formed a wonderful counterpoint to the sunset as it fell across the lake. You have to be careful when backlighting a subject that it doesn't go really dark but luckily, in this case, the ice was translucent enough to let enough light through to preserve the detail in it's form. There were quite a few specks of dirt in the ice so I cloned them out in Aperture.
-Russell Berg
Spaces in the Dawn
A dramatic dawn breaking over the shoreline in Victoria. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4 at 22mm f/5 1/2500 ISO 400She has come to this place before and it holds a special kind of honour in her mind. She is alone yet she feels protected, she feels comforted yet her mind has space to roam and think. The light plays and dances in her hair as it slowly reveals the rest of the world around her and lights her face with an amber glow. Her thoughts pause for a moment and she breathes deep into the world around her. Now... now she is ready.
I was recently in Victoria and as my wife slept in the hotel I went out to enjoy the sunrise. Sunrise is a magical time for photographers, slowly the world is revealed to you and the quality of the light is like nothing else. The light itself is so beautiful, you really just need to point your camera somewhere. In this case I was struck by the line of clouds that draws the viewers eye in at the top of the frame and pulls it downward towards the whispy little formations at the left. It almost seemed to me that the clouds where trying to hold back the light and it makes for a dramatic image.
The Edge
The rocky shoreline at Neck Point, Nanaimo. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 75-300 f/4-5.6 at 190mm f/5 1/400 ISO 100
The hard edge of the shore can be an unforgiving place. It is a place of power and danger where waves of unimaginable strength break themselves on the rocks . It is also a place that teems with life of so many different kinds, the kind of place where life began. It seems a place, to us humans, very hostile and dangerous; and yet so much of what we are and who we have become starts and ends at the shore.
The interplay of shape and form in large landscapes is always something that has interested me. I was walking walking around NeckPoint in Nanaimo and I was trying to see in Black and White. Sometimes it is easier to see the form and shape of a thing if you see it without colour. Colour can be very distracting. The camera compresses three dimensions into two, sometimes that is frustrating and sometimes it makes this image. This photo has three long horizontal bands that are compressed on top of each other and give the image an energy that wasn't there even as I looked at the place in real life.
-Russell Berg
Ice and Sky
At sunset on a prairie lake the ice picks up some wonderful colours. Fuji X10 7mm at f/3.6 1/500 ISO 200
Away on the horizon there is a thin, almost insignificant line. A demarcation zone, a transition only; not a place to go but a place to travel through. Being alone on the ice with the giant bowl of heaven all above the idea of a terrestrial life fades into a the background for a moment and that line of trees in the the distance is only a border between ice and sky.
I had just spent a couple of afternoon hours on the lake photographing the snow and ice and I was rewarded with a wonderful prairie sunset. It was quite far north so sunset happened at 4:30. As it began the colours of the snow and ice faded from white to yellow to blue to this wonderful purple and I knew that the foreground needed to be the focus of the photo so I put the horizon near the top third and underexposed by one stop to emphasize the colours. I did punch up the saturation a little in Aperture afterwards.
-Russell Berg