Death of A Leaf

A leaf dies slowly on the tree, it’s decay an amazing mixture of colour and form. Fuji X10 at 7mm f/2 1/1000 ISO 400

I continued wandering through Beban Park and saw this leaf just barely clinging to the tree and dying in such a beautiful display.  I loved the way that the colour and form, especially the negative space formed by the parts of the leaf that had already decayed to be especially interesting.  The light was so bright, however, that it was hard to distinguish the background from the foreground when I took the photo and I knew that this picture had a lot of potential but that it was going to require some work in post.  After importing the image into Aperture I increased the saturation slightly and started to play with ways to pull the leaf off of the background.  I increased the definition and this helped to make the edges more distinct but it still needed more so I burned in the photo on the edges and the parts of the background that showed through the holes in the leaf to darken it.  This got me part of the way there but the colours were still so bright on the edges so I applied a gamma vignette that desaturated and darkened the edges some more.  I applied a little more burn in to the holes in the leaf and it was there.  The treatment added a lot of depth to the image and allowed this wonderful leaf to stand out from the background.

-Russell Berg

Orange Leaves

Orange leaves filter the morning light. Fuji X10 at 14mm f/5.6 1/85 ISO 200

The end of things is a beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking time.  We stand in the satisfied exhaustion of a job well done and we see the beautiful thing that we have made and we know that for now it is ending. But the work that we have done has had a lasting and worthwhile impact.  That is what fall is like for me.  It is so beautiful but it is a kind of death, an ending.

I went out last weekend on Saturday morning because the sunlight was so beautiful and the colours of the autumn leaves were so spectacular.  I wanted to be able to catch the vivid display while the beautiful morning light was so nice.  I found some beautiful trees in Beban Park in Nanaimo and looked for an interesting way to photograph them. The morning light was still not too strong but it supplied just the right amount of light for the slightly translucent leaves as they stood out against the sky. I took a couple of photos with the leaves at dead centre but I looked for a contrast in colour and texture so I shifted to the side and composed the frame to include the gnarled branches of the old maple.  The branches were far enough back to go nicely out of focus so as not to distract from the leaves but also to provide contrast and context.

-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

Blue Lake

A cold mountain lake near Banff. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 16mm f/9 1/160 ISO 100

She stands in the water knee deep and alone, staring off into a landscape that is overwhelming in its beauty.  The cold is seeping into her skin, slowing her blood and making her bones ache.  It is the kind of cold that takes your breath away, the kind of cold that slows movement at your joints and gives you a headache.  Tomorrow morning, before the mists have been burned away by the rising sun she will swim this lake.

My daughter raced in a triathlon in Banff and this was the lake where the swim portion of the course place in.  The lake was glacier fed and very cold so I wanted to produce an image that expressed how cold the lake was.  First I cropped the image down to produce a more symmetrical tree line at both edges of the frame.  I wanted the highest point of the tree lines to be very near the edge of the frame so both sides of the image pull down and in towards the mountain in the background.  I also adjusted the crop in the foreground to place the first rock in the very bottom right corner of the frame.  These almost completely black shapes pull your eye into the image from the bottom right an out to the mountain in the background.  The image of the mountain happens at the intersection of three curves all of which pull your eye in to the centre.  This was taken on a bright sunny day so to get the cold feeling I converted to black and white in  Nik Silver Efex Pro and then reduced the exposure to darken it and added a cross process in Aperture that introduced the blue tint.

-Russell Berg

Mountain Ridge

Dramatic Rocky Mountain ridge near Banff, AB. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 12mm f/11 1/320 ISO 100

The great rocks reach out and pull us in even while they dominate our senses and produce in us a kind of fear tinged with awe.  We stand before them and we know that our mortality is a certain thing and yet our will to live, to experience them, just to stand and see them is so strong. 

Finding a way to present a photograph of a mountain that is not tired and cliche can be a challenge.  For landscape photographers they present an irresistible draw so finding a way to stand out from the millions of mountain photographs is difficult.  When I saw this mountain ridge near Banff on a sunny afternoon I knew that I wanted a very high contrast black and white image with an almost black sky and a black foreground.  I underexposed by one stop to darken the sky and took the image.   I used a very wide angle, 12mm, to allow the range to spread out through the frame, giving the ridge lots of length instead of the traditional towering height that mountains often get in landscape photography.  The image is made more dynamic by the strong visual weight on the left of the photograph and it pulls your eye to the right as the ridge diminishes into the distance.  I brought the image into Nik Silver Efex Pro and applied a high contrast under-exeposed filter to it.  This produced the black skies and the silver mountains that appear almost to float.  Below is the unprocessed colour version of the photograph and you can see how much more dramatic, how much more powerful the image is in black and white.

-Russell Berg

Below is a more tradition composition of the same mountain with it rising higher in the frame.  I feel that the first image with it’s space to breathe and the way it pulls your eye through the frame is a much more powerful photograph.

Mountains rising out of the plain near Banff. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 22mm f/10 11/250 ISO 100