The Dancer Pauses

The dancer pauses for a moment with her hand on the barre, her chest is heaving, her calves are quivering.  She can feel the blister on the inside of her big toe beginning to open up again.  She knows that she is close... she can feel the music and her will pushing here ever closer to exactly the place where her performance needs to be but there is a deep ache in every one of her muscles that cries out for her to stop. The music starts again and she comes back to attitude á terre.

I was looking for a way to illustrate the sweat, the discipline, the pain that it takes to be a good dancer.  These stage beaten pointe shoes speak deeply of thousands of hours of rehearsal and I wanted the lighting to be evocative of that struggle.  I put one flash camera left shooting through a 3" snoot that I made out of a cardboard box, this flash I had at 1/64th power.  In this case my snoots are just cardboard sleeves placed over the head of my flash, but they are quite effective at preventing the light from bouncing all around the set. The second flash was upstage centre pointed directly at the pointe shoes.  It was on a light stand about 2m off the ground, pointing down at the shoes, this flash was at 1/128th power.  I also used a snout here but this one was longer, about 6".  This light gives, I hope, the feeling of a single light hitting the performer, the metaphorical aspiration for all of that rehearsal.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Canon 7D Mk. II EF-S 17-55mm at 55mm f/3.2 1/250 ISO 400

Glass of Light

Lately it has been so rainy and grey that I have been frustrated with wanting to go outside and make photographs and being faced with the same wet, grey light.  So I decided this morning to create my own light and do a still life.  I hung a string of Christmas lights at the end of my hallway and place a vase filled with more Christmas lights sitting on a stool quite near the camera.  I used a 50mm lens and opened it up to f2.8 to turn the christmas lights into soft bubbles of light.  I was having trouble balancing the light in the vase with the glow of the hanging Christmas lights.  The Christmas lights were illuminating the hallway too much so I added a flash at very low power, (1/64).  I put a snoot on the flash to reduce light spill and dropped the shutter speed to as low as I could go to get and still retain the glow out of the lights in the vase.  It was a bit of a tough balancing act to deal with the three light sources, keep the hallway as dark as possible, and keep the vase lit but still glowing.  If I turned up the flash too much, it washed out the glow of the lights inside the vase.  If I increased the shutter speed to kill the ambient light in the hall, then I lost the glow in the vase.  I got as close as I could then I darkened the hallway in Nik Viveza.  It turned out pretty good but the low level of light in the vase makes it look as though the edge of the vase has curves in it.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Improvisation

This is what the pen looked like without the iPhone light

How to build a two light off camera setup without any photo gear.

This summer my car was broken into and just about all of my camera gear was stolen so I haven’t really felt much like keeping this blog updated.  Last night I was fiddling with one of my fountain pens and the orange celluloid of my Delta Dolce Vita seems to glow with an internal fire.  I thought to myself that it would be awesome to have a lamp shade made of this material so I turned off the lights and set the cap of my pen on top of a little flashlight.  It was so beautiful.  I took some pictures of the cap with the one camera I had that wasn't stolen, but then I realized that  with the high contrast setup the carving details on the cap band were lost.  If I had had all of my gear my instinct would have been to pull out one of my flashes, put an orange gel on it to match the light coming from inside the pen and fire away.  Since all of my stuff was stolen I didn’t have that option so it occurred to me to remove the blind cap from the back of the pen cover and use it to cover the light on my iPhone and use that to light up the carving on the cap band.  This had the benefit of turning the light exactly the same colour as the light that was glowing out of the cap but the drawback of being very dim so I had to hold the whole thing very close.  I like the way it turned out and the fact that I didn’t have all my gear meant that I had to come up with a pretty innovative solution that probably made the image better.  Who knows, it certainly was fun.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

For those of you unfamiliar with fountain pens this is the Delta Dolce Vita Oro in a more traditional lighting treatment.

The Dress

I also really like the way that the laces draped and hung on the dress.

I went to my niece’s wedding this past weekend and although she had hired a photographer she asked me to fill in the gaps and shoot the parts and places where the photographer could not be.  This was perfect for me, I really hate posing people and I am horrible at it so it is great for me to not have to do that.  I talked to the photographer about the whole situation, (it’s really important to clarify all of this when you are working alongside a professional), and she was great about it all.  When the ladies where getting ready, and after I had steamed all of the bridesmaid’s dresses, I saw the bride’s dress hanging in the door way to a walk-in closet with the veil draped over the bodice.  The line and form of the empty dress was an appealing and interesting still life so I started to shoot it.  Shooting from outside the closet left the image with a very busy background so I decided to try from the inside the small closet.  I had enough room for my wide angle zoom to get the whole dress in.  I bounced the flash off of the ceiling and turned it down ⅔ of a stop to prevent the whites in the dress from blowing out.  I the flash was bouncing around the walls of the closet so it was almost as though I was shooting from inside a giant soft box that produced some really appealing areas of light and shadow.  In post I pulled the image into Nik Silver Efex Pro, the image was crying out for black and white, darkened the background areas into blackness, and pulled some more texture from the dress.  I was really happy with the end image except for the window behind the veil.  I tried to get it all black but just couldn’t quite do it without wrecking the veil.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Coasting Real Slow

Jackson turned suddenly and pulled away from Paulette. There was so much about her that he didn’t understand.  He had thought he knew who she was and what she wanted with her life but as he glanced back at her, her skirt swinging lightly around her knees, the sun playing through her golden brown hair his stomach twisted and turned.  This was not someone he could just walk away from was it?  He knew that so much of their lives had been announced, determined, and foreordained from their first moments in this clearing in the glade.  He tore himself away, it would have to be something different, someone different and he turned to run, to the dark cool corner of the yard that lead down to the stream and out.

When you explore on bike you see things that you wouldn’t see in a car, including, especially other bikes.  This bike was back from the road almost completely hidden in the overgrowing rain forest.  I really liked the way that the curve of the wheel disappears into the ferns and other undergrowth to create a half circle.  The curve of the circle pulls the eye around and into the mysterious dark spot at the back of the frame.  I love it when an image has a little mystery, a hidden story.

iPhone Series # 1    iPhone Series # 2    iPhone Series # 3

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com