Limitations

Limitations can push creativity.  I recently got a Fuji X-E2 and the only lens I have is a 14mm.  I have always been a slave to the zoom and I feel like I always feel as thought I am going to miss shots if I leave a certain focal range at home.  This means that I am often walking around with a lot of gear, and I still like the versatility that this gives me but the other day, with my new Fuji I found my creativity being pushed in interesting directions because I had some self-imposed limits.  The single prime lens became a stimulus to think about the photos that I would make in a different way and I came up with some interesting results.  In this image the sky was very dramatic and the stump provided a compelling foreground element.  With a 14mm lens you can get quite close and by stopping down the aperture to f/11 everything from one metre in front of me out to the horizon was in focus.  The light was really helping to make things dramatic and the dynamic range of this Fuji sensor did not let the front of the backlit stump lose detail in the blacks. Below I have included a little gallery of other images I got on and around this stump.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Dragon's Watch

Original, unedited photo

The wind, the rain, and the ocean sometimes do a wonderful job to produce some very interesting erosion patterns in the driftwood.  This large stump had been hollowed out form the middle.  I squeezed myself into the middle of this stump with my wide angle lens to get the feeling of a dragon coiled around me.  I loved the way that the root in the middle looked like a dragon’s head (1) that was looking out to the sky.  I wanted to give the dragon something to look at so I brightened the sky so that it would appear as though the dragon was looking out to the sunset (2).  There were going to be a couple of issues with the photograph though.  I wanted to keep everything in focus from the wood 10 cm in front of my lens (3) to the island 5km away on the horizon (4).  A wide angle lens will naturally help keep more of the frame in focus but I also stopped down my aperture to f/10.  The second issue was the huge dynamic range that I was dealing with.  The sky and the background was very bright and the foreground was in deep shadow.  No one exposure could take in that variation in brightness, not without some manipulation.  If I had exposed for the shadowy logs, the sky would be too bright, If I exposed for the sky the logs would be black.  I shot a medium exposure and that leaned towards the highlights and took it in to Nik HDR.  That program does some serious digital voodoo and pulled the detail out of the logs.  

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

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

Purple Tracks

During the summer time we were in Vernon for a weekend and I had seen an old barn with some character that I wanted to photograph at sunset.  The nearby hills cast the barn into shadow so I kept driving around looking for an interesting subject.  The light is everything.  If I had taken this picture at 2 in the afternoon I would have gotten washed out greens, a flat boring railroad track and some very grey rocks.  The light cutting down through all of that horizon in the evening makes the green and yellow come together in a fiery gold, the low slanting light hits the tracks and produces a reflection that pulls your eye into the photo.  The tracks also put the rocks into a light shadow allowing them to display their purple-blue colour.  When photographers go out at sunset or sunrise good things happen.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Sun

I hurried out to Neck Point on a May evening to catch the sunset.  I hurried around to a position so that I would be looking west over the water and discovered that I had a very striking background to a silhouette of some people who had also come out to watch the same sunset.  I snapped off a few quick ones and saw that the atmospheric conditions were giving a beautiful golden yellow glow to my pictures.  I began to watch for an interesting foreground moment with the people who were out in front watching the sun go down.  I was a long ways back so I wasn’t worried about them seeing me losing the natural body language of the moment but there was a sign in the way that kept getting into the frame.  I shifted around and finally the people moved off to the left.  I took quite a few pictures but there were two other moments that I really liked; the man and woman in the frame above sat at a picnic table and she leaned in towards him, (left), I really liked the body language in that moment.  The other one was of a group of younger people; they were standing and talking and watching and the sun caught very nicely in their hair, (bottom left).  In the end I liked the hopeful nature of the man standing, putting both his hands over his eyes and staring out into the sunset and the counterbalance on the left side of the frame that the silhouette of the tree provides.  The last element that really made the decision for me was the fact that I had closed down my aperture and produced a depth of field that produced a sharp foreground and maintained focus on the sunset.  The photo is really about the sun so having it dominate was pretty important.  A few minutes later I got a non-silhouetted image of two people watching the sunset, and, each other.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com