The City Tells a Story

Broken bricks in a wall in Victoria make an interesting composition. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm f/3.4-4 at 15mm f/6.3 1/20 ISO 400

The man in the hat was not at all concerned with how late he was, he didn't care if the caretaker's daughter had to wait for him.  He moved with the kind of unstudied grace that came naturally to a man of certain years and with a certain confidence that came with having made one's way in the world.  She would be there and she would be ready.  As he rounded the corner into the alley the caretaker's daughter stood with her hands on her hips looking angrily at her boot as it shuffled in the dirt.  On top of the wagon loaded with barrels crouched her workman.  She moved towards the man in the hat quickly, anger flashing in her eyes and started to berate him in a quiet voice seething with rage.  The man in the hat reached out and pushed her back slamming her into the other wall of the alley.  As he did this the workman jumped to the ground, his coat catching on the wedge that held the barrels in place.  For just a moment he hung there inches above the ground, the wedge holding his weight, and then it all came down.  The wedge pulled out, the workman fell and the barrels began to fall and roll, crashing and bouncing against the walls of the alley.  The woman was lucky, she had been pushed out of the way.  The two men...

The stories of the city that are rubbed into the bricks has, in places, worn away the sharp edges and left a softened rounded edge.  In other places history has broken and torn at the walls leaving gouges and cavities.  The bricks tell the story of the city, not in words but with an unspoken feeling, a hint and a whisper.

I was walking through downtown Victoria and I saw this corner where a couple of bricks had been broken out.  I felt as though there was an image there with a wonderful story behind it.  Victoria's old downtown has a lot of brick buildings that were built in the late 1800's and I kept wondering to myself what could have caused these two bricks to be broken out.  I took a few photos angled straight on to the corner and shifted just a little when I saw that down the alley was a very interesting repeating pattern to draw your eye into the background.  It gave the image depth and context.  I am using a very wide angle lens here that plays with the perspective enough to really emphasize the broken bricks and yet it almost pulls your eye around the corner and into the background.  One of the great things about wide angles lenses is that they can really emphasize the item in the foreground but also include a lot of background information.  I also wanted to make sure that I included the shadow on the left side of the frame as it provides a nice visual boundary.  

-Russell Berg

Screech

These beautiful peacocks in Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, let me get very close. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 at f/5.6 1/160 ISO 400

The colour of the bird hits me first, it is a blue so blue that it beggars description.  There is an almost incandescent, glowing quality to the blue and it changes colour ever so slightly as the feathers shift, then settle in the sun.  The bird is a riot of outrageous colours and flamboyant form.

I was wandering around Beacon Hill Park and I heard the screech of what I thought was a peacock.  I followed the sound and saw a couple of them sitting in trees beyond a fenced enclosure.  I tried to get a few shots from that distance but nothing was coming out very nicely.  I heard another screech and it was off in a different direction.  As I wondered towards the sound I saw one wandering around on the grass.  I moved in very slowly and began to snap away.  It was fairly early on a Sunday morning so there weren't alot of people around and the peacock seemed very tame.  It let me get quite close.  I was so focused on this bird so much that I didn't even notice the second peacock until it walked right past me within inches of brushing against me.  I spent about 20 minutes photographing the 3 or 4 birds that gathered around me.  It was very cool.  I was using a long lens 300mm so even though the aperture is only f/5.6 the background is thrown out of focus and I was able to get a nice clean background that doesn't distract from the wonderful feathers.

This peacock's stare was so inquisitive. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 at f/5.6 1/250 ISO 400

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