Dragon's Watch

Original, unedited photo

The wind, the rain, and the ocean sometimes do a wonderful job to produce some very interesting erosion patterns in the driftwood.  This large stump had been hollowed out form the middle.  I squeezed myself into the middle of this stump with my wide angle lens to get the feeling of a dragon coiled around me.  I loved the way that the root in the middle looked like a dragon’s head (1) that was looking out to the sky.  I wanted to give the dragon something to look at so I brightened the sky so that it would appear as though the dragon was looking out to the sunset (2).  There were going to be a couple of issues with the photograph though.  I wanted to keep everything in focus from the wood 10 cm in front of my lens (3) to the island 5km away on the horizon (4).  A wide angle lens will naturally help keep more of the frame in focus but I also stopped down my aperture to f/10.  The second issue was the huge dynamic range that I was dealing with.  The sky and the background was very bright and the foreground was in deep shadow.  No one exposure could take in that variation in brightness, not without some manipulation.  If I had exposed for the shadowy logs, the sky would be too bright, If I exposed for the sky the logs would be black.  I shot a medium exposure and that leaned towards the highlights and took it in to Nik HDR.  That program does some serious digital voodoo and pulled the detail out of the logs.  

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Bees In Flight

As I explained in my last post I was working hard to catch bees in an interesting pose in the flowers when I decided to set a more difficult challenge for myself.  I wanted to see if I could catch a bee in flight.  I decided to start with them on the flowers because then I would have a reference point to lock my focus on.  The problem is that bees take off really quickly and if you are going to get a picture where you can see any detail you have to get really close so they fly out of frame very quickly.  There were no bees at all in my first 10 pictures because they had flown out of frame before I could react and press the button.  I began to watch them more closely and noticed that they would generally rub their front legs together in a particular way before they took off.  This little warning combined with the realization that I would have to frame the shot a little wider and depend partially on cropping to get a closeup shot meant that I got some decent shots.  It was still really difficult to keep the bees in focus because they never flew straight up from the flower so they were often flying out of the plain of focus.  I tried to deal with this by stopping down my aperture and it helped but the bees are still not really sharp.  The other thing that I really like about this photograph, as opposed to the other two below is the fact that there is such a strong sense of place.  The background, while blurred enough to not be distracting, helps us understand where we are and makes the bee seem bigger. 

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

The Bee spots me as he comes in for a landing.

Bees lifting off from a flower.

To Look A Bee In The Eye

Sometimes being a good photographer is just being open to the possibility of a photograph.  I was out wandering around one day, just exploring wonderful Vancouver Island and I had taken my camera with me.  I stumbled on to a beautiful spot called Moorecroft Regional Park that has a great bench sitting on a spit of land with a bay on either side and the Georgia Straight out in front of you.  It was so peaceful and beautiful, the sun was just warm enough to make the breeze a wonderful cool counterpoint and I noticed that there where bees everywhere harvesting food from the yellow flowers all around me.  When you are interested in doing macro photography many times a small point and shoot will do a wonderful job.  The small lens and small sensor combine to give a very short minimum focusing distance.  My Fuji X10 is always with me in my purse so I pulled it out and began to try and get really close.  The challenge here is to get close enough that you can get the bee to fill the frame and then to keep things in focus.  When you are this close even very small movements of the camera can throw your subject out of focus.  So I would lock focus on the flower, wait for the bee to do something interesting, try and hold very still, then press the shutter.  I did get stung once.  If you are struggling with focus you can shut down your aperture, giving you a deeper field of focus but I really wanted the other flowers in the background to blur out so that they wouldn’t be distracting.  The shot above is my favourite but I did get a couple of other interesting ones below.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

In my next post I will discuss some of the challenges of photographing bees in flight.

I especially liked the dynamic background that I had for this macro shot.

A more traditional macro insect shot.

Eyes

When I came across these two young ladies and their very beautiful, striking eyes I knew that I wanted to do a portrait of the pair of them.  I wanted that portrait to be focused, with a laser like intensity on their eyes.  I also wanted both of their eyes to be in the same image and I wanted the viewers experience of the image to be dominated by their eyes.  Taking a portrait this close up means that the lighting has to be done carefully or the reflection coming back at you will be distracting.  I could have done it with natural light, I had a window right nearby but I wanted a dramatic intensity to the light that would punch up the image.  I had discovered a very cheap way to convert an off camera flash into a pretty decent ring light by a company called DIY Lighting Kits.  It’s kind of a folding plastic contraption that captures the light from your flash and reflects it outward in a ring.  I put the camera’s lens through the middle of the ring flash, dialled in the exposure manually to darken the background and shot away.  I wanted a dramatic intense look so I upped contrast and saturation in the eyes.  You have to be careful when doing this as you can really ruin the skin tone if you take it too far.  Viveza by Nik allows you to focus your adjustments on small areas, (like the blue of their eyes), and not ruin the rest of your image.  I also added a vignette to further darken the edges of the photograph.  

For a different lighting setup of another closeup portrait check out this image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

I also did a black and white version but settled on the colour because of the striking blue grey in both their eyes that has such a different character in each of them.

The only issue that I have is that I did not adjust the model on the bottom so that she was straight on to me.  Her head is very slightly tilted to her left and I wish that I had noticed this when I did the portraits.

Up in the Gutter

I was crawling around on some scaffolding in Victoria on a Sunday morning to get some images of demolition/construction site. As I was leaving I looked up just before I started to climb down and I saw that I was eye level with a very interesting gutter on the next building.  The texture of the chipped yellow paint over the blue tin… lead? of the gutter was really compelling.  I snapped off the picture and didn’t pay enough attention to the exposure.  The image became a study in texture and colour that I wanted to work on when I got it into my computer.  I loved the way that the steel blue, the aging yellow, the orange brick and the umber rust all played together along with the incredible variation in texture that each colour represented.  However, there was detail on the left and the right of the image that was very distracting and the red caution ribbon was just too much.  I had taken the photo without bothering to notice that my aperture was at f/18, effectively bringing the whole image into focus so with my Nik tools I increased the saturation and texture to emphasize the parts of the image I wanted stronger, added a blur and a vignette (darkening around the edges), to de-emphasize or eliminate the parts of the image that I didn’t want.  We have such amazing digital tools available to us that we have the capability to make our mistakes into something worthwhile.

The original image as it came out of the camera lacks punch and focus

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com