Reaching

I love my 10-22mm lens.  I have found it to be very versatile.  If you can get very close it can provide some dramatic sports photographs and can it ever pull a lot into the frame if you don’t have much space.  Here I was standing in a very crowded parking lot near the Seattle Steam Company.  It was the middle of the summer tourist rush and this factory is right below the Pike Place Market so there was no way that I was going to be able to wait until the parking lot emptied.  My 10-22 allowed me to walk right to the edge of the parking lot and still get everything the whole building in the frame.  I like the way that the lens pushes the smokestacks so that they almost appear to converge out of the complicated shapes and lines of the factory below.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Purple Tracks

During the summer time we were in Vernon for a weekend and I had seen an old barn with some character that I wanted to photograph at sunset.  The nearby hills cast the barn into shadow so I kept driving around looking for an interesting subject.  The light is everything.  If I had taken this picture at 2 in the afternoon I would have gotten washed out greens, a flat boring railroad track and some very grey rocks.  The light cutting down through all of that horizon in the evening makes the green and yellow come together in a fiery gold, the low slanting light hits the tracks and produces a reflection that pulls your eye into the photo.  The tracks also put the rocks into a light shadow allowing them to display their purple-blue colour.  When photographers go out at sunset or sunrise good things happen.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Jellyfish

I wandered into the Vancouver Aquarium, not quite sure what to expect.  Very near the entrance was an entrancing exhibit of wonderfully beautiful, jellyfish. They were graceful, colourful, and elegant.  Getting a good image through the glass is not as difficult as you might think.  First of all it is very important to turn off your flash.  There were a number of people taking pictures with their phones using a flash and all that they got was a reflection of their flash in the glass.  Try and find a bit of glass that is relatively clean and get in nice and close.  This will limit the number of reflections that the sensor will pick up.  If you have a lens hood on put it right against the glass and you will get almost no reflections.  The room was dark so that helped eliminate distractions seen through the tank and I opened up to f.2.8 to throw the jellyfish in the background into a pleasant blur.  I love the way that vibrant purple provides a striking counterpoint to the ivory of the jellyfish bodies.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Swallowing The Chairs

Andrew turned the corner and stopped, it was for him a very familiar spot, a place where he came every day to catch the bus.  In fact he came here so often to wait for the bus that he had made his own bus stop bench by bringing over three lawn chairs that he had stolen from Wilson’s house.  He had, at first taken one chair and brought it there but it seemed out of place, unbalanced and so he brought another, and another until he had what amounted to a bus stop bench where another person could sit down without the social awkwardness that comes from sitting right next to a stranger.  Andrew doubted that Wilson had ever even noticed that the chairs were gone; his yard was like a great resting place for the rusting, unused, discards of an entire city.  There was a sense of finality about this moment though.  He wasn’t just waiting for a bus, he was waiting for the bus.  The bus which would turn the corner, travel down Nicol street and stop around the corner from the Salvation Army Men’s Shelter and stop, it would continue on its route circling the south end of the city until it travelled past Andrew’s improvised bus stop bench once again.  This time though, Andrew would not be on it, he was leaving and he didn’t expect he would return.

One morning I was driving around the south downtown area of Nanaimo looking for good images.  I spent a good part of the day looking around for images and two of my best are in the posts here and here.  As I turned a corner I noticed a very large abandoned lot that was completely overgrown.  Living in a temperate rainforest means that it doesn’t take long for nature to reclaim its primacy over the sculpted lawns and neat curbstones.  Someone had left three lawn chairs sitting right at the corner of the intersection and the ivy and the grasses had grown through, around, and over them.  There was an interesting story here and I wanted an image that helped to start the story.  When I pulled the image  into Aperture I knew I wanted it in black and white and as I started to play with it in Nik Silver Efex Pro I decided to create a bit of an area of mystery and depth so I darkened the triangle in the upper right area of the image until it was almost black.  I wanted to create the perception that something could be coming out of the forest behind you, if you ever sat down in those chairs.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Sun

I hurried out to Neck Point on a May evening to catch the sunset.  I hurried around to a position so that I would be looking west over the water and discovered that I had a very striking background to a silhouette of some people who had also come out to watch the same sunset.  I snapped off a few quick ones and saw that the atmospheric conditions were giving a beautiful golden yellow glow to my pictures.  I began to watch for an interesting foreground moment with the people who were out in front watching the sun go down.  I was a long ways back so I wasn’t worried about them seeing me losing the natural body language of the moment but there was a sign in the way that kept getting into the frame.  I shifted around and finally the people moved off to the left.  I took quite a few pictures but there were two other moments that I really liked; the man and woman in the frame above sat at a picnic table and she leaned in towards him, (left), I really liked the body language in that moment.  The other one was of a group of younger people; they were standing and talking and watching and the sun caught very nicely in their hair, (bottom left).  In the end I liked the hopeful nature of the man standing, putting both his hands over his eyes and staring out into the sunset and the counterbalance on the left side of the frame that the silhouette of the tree provides.  The last element that really made the decision for me was the fact that I had closed down my aperture and produced a depth of field that produced a sharp foreground and maintained focus on the sunset.  The photo is really about the sun so having it dominate was pretty important.  A few minutes later I got a non-silhouetted image of two people watching the sunset, and, each other.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com