Drunken Mailboxes

I really enjoy my photographic equipment.  I like reading manuals and reviews and sometimes I get wrapped up in the technical stuff at the expense of going out and making images.  When that happens I like to force myself to simplify, so on a recent cycling trip around Hornby and Denman Islands I took only the phone that was on my camera.  I don’t often take my camera with me when I am biking but on this trip I was determined to go out with just my phone and come back with some decent images.  This week you will see them here.

I flashed past these mailboxes and as I looked back at them the image of 6 drunken friends stumbling home in the too bright sunlight of the morning after flashed through my mind.  I knew that angle and perspective would be important here as I hadn’t noticed anything until I was almost past the mailboxes so taking a picture from straight on would not produce a strong image.  I leaned in to the mailbox and allowed the right mailbox to fill the frame, this forced the further mailboxes to recede into the frame and exaggerated the lean.  When I got the image home, the fact that the mailboxes where green and the foreground and the background was green made the image pretty monochromatic anyway, and as I wanted to emphasize the form I converted everything to black and white.

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

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Swallowing The Chairs

Andrew turned the corner and stopped, it was for him a very familiar spot, a place where he came every day to catch the bus.  In fact he came here so often to wait for the bus that he had made his own bus stop bench by bringing over three lawn chairs that he had stolen from Wilson’s house.  He had, at first taken one chair and brought it there but it seemed out of place, unbalanced and so he brought another, and another until he had what amounted to a bus stop bench where another person could sit down without the social awkwardness that comes from sitting right next to a stranger.  Andrew doubted that Wilson had ever even noticed that the chairs were gone; his yard was like a great resting place for the rusting, unused, discards of an entire city.  There was a sense of finality about this moment though.  He wasn’t just waiting for a bus, he was waiting for the bus.  The bus which would turn the corner, travel down Nicol street and stop around the corner from the Salvation Army Men’s Shelter and stop, it would continue on its route circling the south end of the city until it travelled past Andrew’s improvised bus stop bench once again.  This time though, Andrew would not be on it, he was leaving and he didn’t expect he would return.

One morning I was driving around the south downtown area of Nanaimo looking for good images.  I spent a good part of the day looking around for images and two of my best are in the posts here and here.  As I turned a corner I noticed a very large abandoned lot that was completely overgrown.  Living in a temperate rainforest means that it doesn’t take long for nature to reclaim its primacy over the sculpted lawns and neat curbstones.  Someone had left three lawn chairs sitting right at the corner of the intersection and the ivy and the grasses had grown through, around, and over them.  There was an interesting story here and I wanted an image that helped to start the story.  When I pulled the image  into Aperture I knew I wanted it in black and white and as I started to play with it in Nik Silver Efex Pro I decided to create a bit of an area of mystery and depth so I darkened the triangle in the upper right area of the image until it was almost black.  I wanted to create the perception that something could be coming out of the forest behind you, if you ever sat down in those chairs.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Art

When I took this photo I was focused on the design that the barista had produced.  I was trying to underexpose it to make the background less obvious and distracting but when I got it into Aperture I realized that I had a chance to make the background black.  I opened the image in Nik Viveza, (Viveza is the colour version of Nik Silver Efex) and began to work to darken the image.  The Nik image editing suite is an amazing piece of software that is so easy to use and yet is very versatile.  You set a circle that you determine the size of down on the image and whichever tones are under the centre of the circle will be affected by the controls that you set.  Even if there are other tones/colours under the circle they will not be affected by your changes.  It really works wonderfully and you don’t end up with hard edges as so often happens when you use brushes to edit a photo.  I worked my way around the cup until I had only the rim and the coffee floating in a pool of blackness.

For other photos from the coffee shop shoot check here and here. 

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Stacks

Caroline sat waiting.  The warm mug between her outstretched fingers beginning to take the edge off the the damp cold that seemed to have followed her into the coffee shop.  She looked up suddenly, her eyes drawn to movement at the door but it wasn’t her.  She looked down again at the fingers of her left hand, the lines of age just beginning to show in her knuckles and she rubbed them absently.  Anxious, her head jerked up towards the door again but she still wasn’t there.  The clock over the window to her left a reminder that she was at the very least late, but probably… her mother wasn’t coming.

As I was photographing the coffee shop I was drawn to the mugs that sat on the Sineso machine. There was a utilitarian feel to the stacks but enough random placement and tilted lines to make them visually interesting.  The cups where all white and I knew I would convert it to black and white but I wanted a treatment that wouldn’t loose the interesting lines in a field of white.  I brought the image into Nik Silver Efex Pro and chose an underexposed effect that brought more gray into the image and emphasized the reflections in the cups.  I also darkened the background so that it would not distract from the main focus of the image.  I was really happy with the way that reflections give life to the image; reflections in the cups in the stainless steel bar that cuts across the cup and in the bright line that runs across the bottom of the frame.

For my other photos from this coffee shop shoot check here and here.​

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Pour

A little while back my son asked if I would photograph a coffee shop for a website that he was designing for them.  It was an interesting challenge and I enjoyed the work, the next three blog entries are going to be from that project.  I love to be able to tell a story in a photograph and for me this image goes a long way to telling the story of The Buzz.  There is motion in the image as the coffee is being poured (1).  The lighting is warm and soft and through the steam there is a couple of friends talking in the background (2).  As I was shifting around trying not to appear in reflection in the coffee pot I noticed that I could achieve a position where the stream of coffee appeared to reverse itself and flow up into the cup that is reflected in the pot (3).  I love it that we can see both the outside of the cup and the inside in the reflection.  If you would like to see the website check out The Buzz.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com