Ready

​Fuji X10

I was walking down the street and saw this old man sitting there, staring off down the street.  His face was turned away from me and I really wanted his face in the frame so I walked past him, turned and snapped quickly before he could see that I was getting his picture.  There is a real advantage behind knowing your camera well enough that you can simply turn and fire.  For me, having started my photographic adventure in the days of film, that means having a camera that goes up to my eye.  I also find having a zoom lens that I adjust manually, rather than with an electronic switch to be far faster.  I carry a purse and my Fuji X10 is always in there.  It is small, has lots of analogue controls, a manual zoom, and a viewfinder.  For me these things are non-negotiable in a street camera.  It is not always perfect, I screwed up the exposure here because I had been shooting in very bright sunlight and forgot that I had turned the exposure compensation way down.  This is why his face is not well exposed.  I really had to push the file hard in post to get what I got, still I really like it

-Russell Berg

Life In The Gaps

In 1993 Jurassic Park hit the movie screens and amidst all the screaming and running and destruction there was one thing that has stayed with me.  The Jeff Goldblum character makes several self-important and arrogant pronouncements but one thing he said rang especially true.  “Life finds a way.”  It has always fascinated me, this biological imperative to survive, to find a foothold and to cling to it with everything that it can.  Why is life so persistent?  Why does it want to be alive?  What makes that drive to pass it’s genetic material on such a powerful thing?  In the most inhospitable places on the earth we find life clinging to the barest most meagre resources so that it can… find a way.

I used to live in north-eastern BC and I loved to climb mountains.  It always fascinated me that I would spend hours walking over bare rock and up there in the wind, where July blizzards where not unheard off, where there was only the merest scrapes of soil and the there would be a pine sapling clinging to the side of a rock.  The picture above was taken on Vancouver Island at sea level, not high in the alpine but the way that these plants had found the crack in the rock and made a place to live there reminded me of that quest to survive that those northern alpine plants engage in.  I like the way that the plants bisect the rocks, claiming a place to live that dominates the frame.

-Russell Berg

Half

​The raw image that became the portrait above.

…or How to Fix A Portrait.  Wandering around firing off your camera without giving your image a lot of thought rarely turns out well but sometimes the circumstances do not allow for a great deal of thought until afterwards when you are sitting down with the image on the computer.  This week I am focusing on photos that I took during the last musical that I directed and this portrait of this young actor is one of them.  As you can see from the image to the right, the picture that came out of the camera was nothing special.  The young lady’s expression was so full of excitement and life, it carried so much anticipation that I really wanted to do something about the fact that I had completely ruined the composition by cutting off part of her face.  I often tell my young actors “if you make a mistake commit to it completely and people will think it is an artistic choice.”  So I decided to follow my own advice and instead of bemoaning the fact that I had ruined what could have been an interesting photograph I committed completely to my mistake and cut her face right in half.  There is something very compelling about that very striking single eye peering out at us from the image and I love how it turned out.  I warmed up the colour temperature and increased the saturation, especially of the greens and that brought out the green in her eyes.  I also increased the values on the black point to give a bit more drama to the lashes around her eye.  I did a little work on some minor skin blemishes because the cropping is so tight and when I was done I was very happy with the way my ‘mistake’ turned out.

-Russell Berg

Focus

Backstage there is a whirling tornado of exhaustion, outrageous energy, and frayed nerves.  Some of them look as though they are about to come apart at the seams, some of them look as though they are about to throw up.  For many of them it is the first time and they will step out on to the boards and the light will hit them and three-hundred pairs of eyes will watch.  There are always the questions, do I know it well enough? will I hit that high G? can I time my jump just right? But in the middle of it all these two find the calm, gentle centre of themselves and they know.  They know that they are ready, they know can sing like angels and dance like demons, they know because they see it there in the other’s eyes.

I direct theatre at the school where I teach and last year as we were about to go on stage for the opening night of our big musical I caught sight of these two backstage.  They are sisters and they were quietly speaking to each other, foreheads touching, a look of intense focus and concentration on each of their eyes.  I knew I wanted the image to include both of them so I snapped off a shot over the should of one and into the eyes of the other.  I knew one image wouldn’t tell the whole story though so I slid around to the other side and took a similar image of the other sister.  Both of the girls have very striking blonde hair so I knew that I wanted a high key image so I gave it that kind of treatment in Nik Silver Efex Pro and then toned down the effect in hair of the girl on the right so that I could get back the detail.  The images work well together, producing a mirror image study of concentration and focus.

-Russell Berg

For more portraits of young actors check here, here, and here.​

Silhouette

I was wandering around the USGP race course at Bend Oregon I was getting down on the ground because the low angle makes the riders appear more heroic when I noticed the tree and the dramatic sky in the background.  Every camera I have, even my compact carry around camera, has a quick, manual adjustment for exposure control.  Most cameras will over expose the sky so I almost always shoot ⅔ to 1 full stop under when it is a bright sunny day.  In this case I realized that I could produce a pretty nice silhouette with a beautiful sky behind the rider.  I underexposed 1 full stop and took a few shots as the next riders came by.  I noticed the lines that the vapour trail (1) and the clouds (2) were making as they drew the eye towards the rider.  I took a few exposures with the rider dead centre but you couldn’t tell what was going on with the tree in the background.  It might have been nice to have only the rider on the horizon but I couldn’t find a spot where I could get that shot and I like the fact that the rider is taller than the tree giving him a stronger position in the frame.  As well the tree gives us a sense of place.

-Russell Berg