Painting With Light

In my last post I was playing with light indoors, both as a modifier to the image and as the subject.  For these pictures I was playing with light as I rode home on the ferry.  I live on an island so riding the ferry is a regular part of my life and one evening as we were approaching Nanaimo I was out on the deck with my camera and tripod.  I was in the bow of the boat as we headed in close to the city and I used a 30second exposure with my lens at it’s widest focal length, (17mm)  I held it there for several seconds then zoomed in during the exposure to create the light trails and stayed at the longest focal length, (55mm) for several more seconds.  When I got it back to my computer I played with the saturation and the contrast quite a bit to get a pretty striking image.  Luckily it was a pretty calm night, so the boat was not moving up and down and my light trails have just enough movement in them to give the thread like appearance but not so much that they are jiggling all over the place.  The long exposure also smoothed out the water providing a nice contrast to the harsh lines of light in the top of the frame.  The image is a not a literal representation of anything, but rather my light painting of Nanaimo at night.  Below are some of my other experiments with light on that same ferry trip.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Glass of Light

Lately it has been so rainy and grey that I have been frustrated with wanting to go outside and make photographs and being faced with the same wet, grey light.  So I decided this morning to create my own light and do a still life.  I hung a string of Christmas lights at the end of my hallway and place a vase filled with more Christmas lights sitting on a stool quite near the camera.  I used a 50mm lens and opened it up to f2.8 to turn the christmas lights into soft bubbles of light.  I was having trouble balancing the light in the vase with the glow of the hanging Christmas lights.  The Christmas lights were illuminating the hallway too much so I added a flash at very low power, (1/64).  I put a snoot on the flash to reduce light spill and dropped the shutter speed to as low as I could go to get and still retain the glow out of the lights in the vase.  It was a bit of a tough balancing act to deal with the three light sources, keep the hallway as dark as possible, and keep the vase lit but still glowing.  If I turned up the flash too much, it washed out the glow of the lights inside the vase.  If I increased the shutter speed to kill the ambient light in the hall, then I lost the glow in the vase.  I got as close as I could then I darkened the hallway in Nik Viveza.  It turned out pretty good but the low level of light in the vase makes it look as though the edge of the vase has curves in it.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Pushed Around

We took some of my prairie family on a little boat trip out to see the sea lions, (pictures of those are coming), that winter in Nanaimo near the Harmac Pulp Mill.  On the way we saw this crew loading a barge with logs from the log booms that were floating in the water.  The tug would maneuver logs from the boom so that they were within reach of the crane then the crane operator would hoist them up on to the barge.  It was a fascinating operation and I wanted to get an image that would capture as much of the dynamic motion as you can in a still image.  Before I got this image I got some pictures of the logs coming up out of the water and the water rushing off of them but we weren’t in the right position to get the tug in the frame as well.  I maneuvered around and waited for the next lift.  These tugs dip and dive in the water, heeling over very steeply and I was rewarded with this tug turning sharply to maneuver just as the logs came up out of the water.  The image tells whole story and the movement of the machines is accentuated by the dynamic slash of orange (1.) that cuts across the frame from bottom left corner to upper right.  The other payoff is that you can see both the tug and crane operators (2.).  I was very happy with the result.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Holding Tight

The old girl wallows a bit in heavy seas, the bilge pumps too slowly, and the starter needs a tap of the hammer to get it going but she has plied the waters of the inside passage for 6 decades, hauled halibut, herring, crab, and prawns, and brought her crew home safely every time.  At times the water, has come over the bow, the engine has refused to sputter to life, the electrical systems have all gone dark but every time, with the help, urging, and cursing of her crew she has eventually roared to life and brought them safely home.  Now she rests, the water laps gently agains the wooden hull in this protected passage and she holds tightly to the safety of the dock.

I was floating down Newcastle Passage heading back to my slip when I saw this old boat.  I knew that it would provide for an interesting subject but there were a few challenges.  There was a mess of distracting and uninteresting colours and a very busy background.  The first step was to convert to black and white.  That instantly improved the image but I still wasn’t getting the texture and the age of the vessel.  I have tried this kind of thing in Silver Efex Pro but Nik has another plugin called HDR Efex that really pulls the texture out of an image in an interesting way.  The peeling paint, the dents and the age of the boat really came forward.  Next I had to deal with the background.  I added control points all over the background in each different tonal area that allowed me to darken the background and separate the boat from it.  It’s better but still not completely successful.  The fact that I am using a telephoto lens here works against me being able to separate the boat from the background as telephotos tend to compress your image.  The next thing that I wanted to do was to enhance and brighten the silvery smooth water.  I felt like this would provide an interesting contrast to the battered boat so I brightened the water and increased the contrast.  If there is one thing that I am still unhappy with it is that I wish there where a little more breathing space on either end of the boat inside the frame.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Limitations

Limitations can push creativity.  I recently got a Fuji X-E2 and the only lens I have is a 14mm.  I have always been a slave to the zoom and I feel like I always feel as thought I am going to miss shots if I leave a certain focal range at home.  This means that I am often walking around with a lot of gear, and I still like the versatility that this gives me but the other day, with my new Fuji I found my creativity being pushed in interesting directions because I had some self-imposed limits.  The single prime lens became a stimulus to think about the photos that I would make in a different way and I came up with some interesting results.  In this image the sky was very dramatic and the stump provided a compelling foreground element.  With a 14mm lens you can get quite close and by stopping down the aperture to f/11 everything from one metre in front of me out to the horizon was in focus.  The light was really helping to make things dramatic and the dynamic range of this Fuji sensor did not let the front of the backlit stump lose detail in the blacks. Below I have included a little gallery of other images I got on and around this stump.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com