An Eye To The Sky

You wander around faced with an abundance of wonderful subjects, good access, and unusual wildlife so taking pretty pictures happens as long as you've got a modicum of focus and some basic skills.  However, making a good image with something to say is another thing entirely.  Finding the moment in the passing minutes is often like dipping your cup into a rushing river to find one particular drop of water.  Sometimes it happens because you are watching intently and with great purpose, sometimes it happens by accident.  

I took probably 15 images of this White-Naped Crane at the Seattle Zoo but there was one, this one, that seemed to have something to say.  His neck arches gracefully against the blurred green background, light and shadow play agains the curve of his neck, his eye seems to be searching for something lost, something that he once knew.  It's really all about patience, capturing this moment meant waiting beside the  crane exhibit until this bird showed me who he was.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Round Sky

Windmills are a compelling landscape subject but I was looking for a different point of view that provided and interesting form and a compelling shape.  I place myself near the base of one of the windmills, got down on the ground and pointed my camera up.  The 10mm wide angle lens compressed and converged the lines of the windmills.  I was pretty happy with this but I wanted a way to emphasize the line and form of the image by removing the colour.  To the left is the progression of edits that I did to eventually get to the image I wanted.  The first one is the colour image that I got out of the camera and even though I shot it during a sunset the colours were not that interesting and I felt that they distracted from the form and shapes inherent in the image.  In the second image I did a high key conversion in Silver Efex Pro and I got a nice B&W image but I had lost the interesting circular shape in the sky.  I pulled back the brightness and increased the contrast but I ended up with an image that was completely dominated by the circular shape in the sky so I pulled back and found a middle ground.  I was happy with the shapes and lines so I decided to add a blue tint.  

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Goodbye Love

Mark: Mimi still loves Roger.  Is Roger really jealous or afraid that Mimi's weak

Roger: Mimi did look pale

Mark: Mimi's gotten thin.  Mimi's running out of time. Roger's running out the door--

Roger: No more! Oh no! I've gotta go.

Mark: Hey! For someone who's always been let down who's heading out of town?

Roger:  For someone who longs for a community of his own, who's with his camera, alone?  I'll call. I hate the fall.  (Mimi enters) You heard?

Mimi:  Every word. You don't want baggage without lifetime guarantees. You don't want to watch me die?  I just came to say goodbye love, goodbye love

If you'd like to see how part of the scene turned out check it out here.  James Dean as Roger, Kody Dennison as Mark, and Micalla Wallace as Mimi

If you would like to see more portraits that I have done of my actors check here, here, here, and here

My theatre club did a production of RENT this year and as we cast the show I wanted a Mimi that was able to express a fragility and vulnerability beneath a thin crust of self-confidence.  This young actor quickly found this in her work with the character and I feel like this photograph captures that.  Mimi is watching from the background as Roger, the man she is in love with, explains to his friend why he can’t be around her, why he can’t watch her die. (Mimi has AIDS.)  Mimi is trapped by her health, trapped by her relationship with Roger, trapped by her addictions, and trapped by her poverty.  As she enters the stage near the end of the musical she sees the last of her hope whither up and float away in the autumn wind.  We put her at the back of the stage to hear Roger’s last words about her where the metaphorical bars of her existence are made real in the bars of the scaffolding.  Probably, there were very few people in the audience who saw her standing there in the background but for me this image, and the character that this actor brings to it, encapsulates everything about who Mimi is.  I shot it in very low light so it was very grainy and unattractive as a colour image so I imported it into Silver Efex Pro and as a grainy B&W it had exactly the kind of gritty intensity that fit the scene.

-Russell Berg

Sometimes Red...

Sometimes red is just red and sometimes it is blood and passion and loyalty.  Sometimes red is the heat of anger, the all encompassing compulsion of love, the binding rage of jealousy.  But sometimes red… is just red.

One fall I was walking around taking photos of the beautiful foliage and on impulse I picked up one leaf that I thought was particularly beautiful and I carried it around all over town taking pictures of it in different circumstances.  (See another example of a portrait of this leaf here.)  The leaf had such a wonderful colour and vein structure that I wanted an image that would really emphasize these two characteristics so I looked for a place where I could place it so that it would appear alone against the backdrop of the high sky.  I twisted the stem around a small branch that was hanging down above me, composed so that you couldn’t see any other branches and took the picture underexposing a little.  I pumped up the saturation levels a little and increased the contrast to give the red some real punch.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Variations in The Pattern

I was walking along a beach in Panama, looking for interesting patterns and textures to photograph.  I headed out of the resort are to a quieter area where the sand had not been disturbed when I saw this coconut and a large area of undisturbed sand.  There was a culvert up the beach where the runoff from the nearby village found its way to the ocean.  There had just been a large storm (check out this image of the coming storm) and the rushing rain water had pulled the sand into this beautiful textured pattern.  The human eye craves variation within patterns and I felt that I had a pretty good example of that here.  The coconut provides an interesting interruption in the lines in the sand as they pull your from the left foreground to the the right background.  The low point of view, (I was laying on the ground), and the wide angle lens, (10mm), accentuate this movement.  

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com