Mother & Child

A mother seal gently nudges her pup in the waters of Departure Bay. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300 at 300mm f/13 1/200 ISO 100

I went out into Departure Bay to get some good images of seals. From my kayak I saw them sunning themselves on the shore. We stayed back quite a ways but many of them were quite curious animals and a seal pup popped up quite close to my kayak. I noticed this and as I pulled up my camera to get a photo the mother popped up right beside and gave the pup a little nudge. It was a great moment that dramatically improved the image I got. The long telephoto, 300mm on a crop sensor camera really brings the image in, gave me a lot of detail and I cropped it in a little tighter when I got home. Photos of wild animals are always interesting but finding a way to tell a story with the image or reveal a behaviour makes them more dynamic and compelling.

-Russell Berg

Curious Quail

A quail gives a quizzical backward glance from a branch near Neck Point. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300 at 300mm f/5.6 1/400 ISO 640

I was walking out to Neck Point in Nanaimo when I heard a rustling in the thick undergrowth.  I stopped and stood still for a moment and suddenly some movement caught my eye on the branch above my head.  Normally if I am walking around with both a wide angle and telephoto lens I will have the telephoto on my camera.  I figure that if a beautiful picture requiring a wide angle presents itself if is most likely to be a landscape that is not going to move, however, if I see something that requires a telephoto, like some wildlife, it is most likely not going to wait around for me to change lenses so I had better be ready.  On this day, that thinking paid off.  The quail was up on the branch but moving around a fair bit so I got it in frame quickly and squeezed off a bunch of photos.  They were all fairly standard bird in a tree images and I was hoping for something that would express a little of the bird’s personality.  Suddenly it turned away from me as though it were going to jump from the branch and just before it did it looked back towards me.  I love the curve of it’s head, the curious eye contact and the pretentiously comical feather sprouting from the top of it’s head.  I wasn’t happy with in the image were how bright the branch was so I burned it in then reduced highlights in Aperture.  I also wish I had the Photoshop skills to remove the smaller branch that crosses the bird’s legs and the dark leaf in front of the large branch but overall I am pretty happy with the image.

-Russell Berg

Goose Neck Barnacles

Goose Neck Barnacles on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Canon EOS XSi 50mm f/1.4 at f5.6 1/60 −1ev

I am a pretty public person, some are probably annoyed with the fact that I sometimes push myself into the spotlight.  I am often loud and assertive but I love the quiet of time to myself.  I was searching for this one day when I drove out to the west coast of the island.  I walked out on to Long Beach in the misty October morning and the rain stopped as I walked across the beach.  I remembered a colony of barnacles on the seaward side of a large rock on the beach and I had timed my arrival to coincide with low tide.  I found my spot in a gap between two large rocks that opened out towards the ocean and began to photograph the barnacles.  I loved the quiet solitude of these moments as I searched for  the right image.  The light wasn’t great so I set up my flash and put an orange gell on my snooted flash.  I wanted orange to warm up the light and give the appearance of sunlight on a very overcast day.  The snoot allowed me to focus the light in a smaller area.  I made my snoot out of cardboard folded into a sleeve that slides over my flash.  I liked the way it brought focus to the barnacle colony.

-Russell Berg

Iguana In The Sun

An Iguana suns itself on the rocks in Tulum, Mexico. Canon EOS XSi EF-S 70-300mm at 300mm f/7.1 1/400 ISO 250

The animal twitches in the sun.  Flies have settled on it’s tail and it lazily flicks it against the rock to dislodge them.  The heat from the rocks radiates up into it’s body and the lizard settles into the warmth.  

I wanted this picture to be a study in composition.  I saw the opportunity to divide the picture in two with the brightly lit rocks on the left and the dark background on the left.  The line that separates the two areas is very sharp and clearly defined not just by differences in tone but also by the shift in focus.  The background has been thrown out of focus and this makes the sharp edge of the light rocks even more distinct.  However, the element that really makes the picture effective is the fact that the focal point, the Iguana, bridges these two areas.  The viewers eye is drawn either up or down the the dividing line between the two areas and towards the lizard.  It’s head points out into the negative space of the shadow and is clearly defined there.

-Russell

Dragonfly

The dramatic colours of a dragonfly. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 22mm f/4.5 1/250 ISO 200

I was driving around town with my windows open and a dragonfly flew in the passenger window smacked against something hard and died.  When I got home I took looked at the poor insects and his body was still in remarkably good shape so I took it out to a very shady part of the the backyard and setup to photograph it.  I set up my flash on a stand and began to figure out my exposure.  As I learned from David Hobby (He has a very good tutorial on learning to use your flash in manual mode.  Check it out you will learn a lot.), I started with an exposure that would allow me to eliminate the ambient light so that the background would go very dark.  This meant using a relatively high shutter speed.  If you look at this image without flash it is basically black even though it was the middle of the day.  This allowed me to completely control the light in the scene.  From there it is just a matter of adjusting the power of the flash until I got the effect I wanted.  I used one Sigma EF-G 530 flash inside a shoot-through umbrella set at 1/16 power.  The umbrella gave the light a nice wrap around effect and placed a nice circular blue-white highlight in the tops of the dragonfly’s eyes.

-Russell Berg