Well I am deep in the weeds with my musical and I will have to take a break from this blog for a couple of weeks. If you are in or around Nanaimo come and check out Legally Blonde at NDSS from May 8-11. Tickets are available at the NDSS office or at the door. Race you to the other side.
Grasses at dawn glistening with dew. Canon EOS XSi EF 70-300mm at 70mm f/13 1/45 ISO 400 −1ev
Slicing Dawn
Apple's wallpaper image that was the inspiration for my photograph.
I was walking along the edge of a marsh just after dawn and I saw this tangle of thick grasses. I was immediately reminded of Apple’s desktop wallpaper image of grass and Picasso’s dictum that good artist’s borrow but great artists steal. I am no great artist but I decided to try and go for something similar with my own interpretation. The grass that I was looking at seemed to cut and slice across the image and the form, line and shape of the image was more compelling to me when I took a wider shot than the one that Apple used. Using a wider point of view also meant that we did not get as direct a view of the dew drops on the grass; instead the mist and dew drops become a soft counterpoint to the slicing horizontal lines of the grass. The wider image also allowed me to include the transition from the dark regions below to the lightening sky at the top and I believe this improves my image. The colour seemed to be getting in the way of, instead of complementing the image so I converted to black and white and was much happier with the result.
For more natural photographs with an abstract feel check here and here.
-Russell Berg
www.seeingberg.com
Alone on Ogden’s Point. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85mm at 33mm f/11 1/200 ISO 100
Into The Distance
Ogden Point in Victoria is a large breakwater designed to protect the port in Victoria but it has a large walkway paved on to the top of it. There are no railings or other distracting visual elements except for a lighthouse positioned at the far end. It makes for an interesting compositional element and I decided to use it as a context for a portrait of my daughter. I got right down on the ground and the relatively wide angle of the lens stretched the pat almost all the way across the bottom of the frame. The path quickly narrows of to the vanishing point, pulling your eye into the frame. I thought about perhaps removing the person in the white jacket from the picture but I like the way that they give a sense of size and perspective. Without the tiny people far out on the path your eye would not have a way to understand the distances that are involved.
I did another very different portrait at Ogden Point that used the breakwater in a very different yet equally striking way. You can see it here.
www.seeingberg.com
The Write Way: Scrivener
About a year and a half ago I came up with the idea that I might want to eventually turn some of the content from this blog into an e-book and I started to keep things organized in a piece of software that I had discovered a little while before. Scrivener is a remarkable piece of writing software that can really be used for just about any form of writing and I use it for my blog. The left hand pane, is an organizational area that holds all of my individual blog posts as individual files. I have each of them collected into a folder according to their photographic genre, (Landscape, Portrait, etc.) The colours of the titles indicate their level of preparation, more on this later. On the left is a thumbnail of the image that gets used in the corkboard and a place to add notes that stay with the entry but will not get published with it.
The corkboard is a really useful place to organize my work, especially since every single entry that I produce has a an image attached to it. Dragging and dropping the images around on the corkboard changes the order in which the entries would be reproduced when eventuallyI export them into an ebook.
When I do the actual writing of the entries I like to have a very clean and plain interface with minimal distractions and Scrivener allows for that as well. You can have a plain black, white, or other coloured background or you can use your own image. I like this semi-abstract photo of torn paper. What you see here off to the right is my whole screen, there are no distracting interface elements and I can see the photo the that I am writing about.
I mentioned the colours of the files previously. I use 6 categories each representing a different level of preparation for the blog entry. (Save For Later, Unwritten, Web Ready, First Revision, Second Revision, and Final) I find these to be very useful and I can see at a glance the status of every single one of my files. These labels are all completely customizable. In Scrivener you can almost always customize the ways in which you organize your work.
I mentioned earlier that Scrivener makes it very easy to focus down on the detail by allowing you to break your larger document into smaller files. If you need to take a look at your document as a whole it is simply a matter of selecting a folder and you will see every document put together as one continuous document.
Literature and Latte has produced in Scrivener a remarkable piece of software that has changed the way that I work in a very positive way. I have mentioned only a few of the features that are most important to me but there is so, so much more. It can do just about any writing task that you could need it to. I also do some long form, novel writing and it is fantastic for that as well. Check it out here.
Brilliant yellow-orange tulips stand out against a dark background. Canon EOS 7D EF 50mm at f/3.5 1/400 ISO 100
Tulips
Spring is such a wonderful time to play with colour. I saw these tulips in someone else’s garden in Nanaimo and as I got a little closer I noticed the beautiful, striking, red fringe on the edge of the petal. As I stood there the background was the light purple flowers that you see at the bottom of the frame. I didn’t like this as much so I got down low and background became dark green foliage that I threw out of focus with a 3.5 aperture. There was a very distracting light coloured branch above the flower on the far right and I cloned it out but I am still not very good with the clone brush and I feel like you can tell I was messing with it. I wanted a gradation of tone in the background so I took the image into Viveza and darkened the portion of the background that was above the flowers. This way the out of focus purple flowers, instead of being a distraction are a part of the background tone transition from light at the bottom to darker at the top with the tulips taking up a very striking intermediary space.
I have another treatment of tulips here and some other flowers here and here.
www.seeingberg.com