The Spanish Dancer

I was wandering the streets of Gastown waiting for the Gastown Criterium Cycling Race to begin and I sat down on a bench next to this very interesting gentleman.  I said hello and we had a conversation about his life.  The lines in his face told the hints of an interesting story and his words filled in the gaps.  He was a folk singer, who had grown up in Montreal and made a living singing Spanish folk songs and jazz in easter Canada.  One day as he was singing in a dark club in Montreal, the kind that you enter by stairs coming down from the sidewalk, he saw a woman dancing.  She moved through the smokey room with a grace that bewitched him and he felt his voice reach out to meet the beauty of her movement.  She danced, he sang.  He sang, she danced and they seemed to rise to make the other better.  Early that morning he sat down to have a drink with her and 6 months later they had moved out to Vancouver.  “That’s how I got to this bench,” he said.  

“Well, thats a more interesting path than most,” I replied. “Do you mind if I take your portrait?  That dancer is written into the lines of your face.”  He smiled and nodded.

Other parts of my Inspired By Harry Callahan series Jumanji In Vancouver

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Dancer In The Mist

This morning the fog was burning through a beautiful mist that hung over the water and it reminded me of this picture.  Joe McNally has said that if you put a dancer against almost any background and you will have a good photograph.  This summer when I was over in Tofino I was on the beach and I was feeling a bit sorry for myself because I had made the drive over the island in the early morning specifically to photograph in the morning light.  There was a thick cover of fog and there wasn’t any morning light.  I did get some decent pictures of Black Oyster Catchers but then this couple came by.  One of them clearly was a dancer, she moved with the grace and poise that only dancers posses and then she started to dance.  It was a truly beautiful thing to watch her dancing through the morning mists across the beach and I was so glad that I had gotten the “bad light”. 

Two other beach portraits that I have done

Grandpa Look!

Lovers

-Russell Berg 

www.seeingberg.com

Purple Night

I recently took a solo boat trip down to DeCourcy Island and I was hoping to make some decent nighttime images.  I had been messing around on the other side of the island where my day time scouting had determined that I was going to get the best images, (turned out I couldn’t get anything good there), and was heading back to my dinghy when I saw a boat behind this old tree.  It was very dark out, almost 10:30, so it took a little bit of work to get myself and my tripod into a position to frame the boat between the two branches.  The wind was starting to come up so the fellow on the boat was going out to check the lines coming off his stern, (the green lights extending from the back of the boat are from his head lamp shining on the water as he paddle to shore).  I did four exposures of a minute each and I felt lucky that the boat was relatively sharp in this one as it was quite windy and I was sure that the motion would show up as blur.  Using a wide angle lens, 10mm, allowed me to get close to the tree and have it dominate the frame but even though the moon was out there wasn’t enough light on it so I lit it up with my flashlight during the long exposure.  I am quite happy with the result.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Jumanji in Vancouver: Inspired by Callahan Part 1

I was in Vancouver and I had just been to the Vancouver Art Gallery and seen an exhibit of Harry Callahan, a dynamic and fascinating street photographer who worked mainly in the ’30-’60’s and I was feeling inspired by what I had seen.  I was at a cycling race and of course I was taking pictures of the race when what was happening across the street from me drew my focus more clearly and I realized I had something far more interesting.  The background was formed by this wonderful convenience store/hotel whose lights both inside and outside the building form a nice counterpoint to the human interaction out front.  There were two couples on either side of the frame, the lady who was drinking and the Jumanji looking guy in the centre of it all.  I noticed a little girl walking by and I waited until she was in a gap in the people and took the picture.  I lucked out in that the two couples where engaged with each other in a really dynamic way and the lady took a drink just at that moment, and of course, the star of the photo is the guy in the pith helmet and the cane.  Without him the photo would have had less of a story to tell and sometimes you just get lucky. 

Perspective

If there is one key that I could give young photographers it is to change your perspective.  We all see the world from eye level 95% of the time.  This perspective is so ubiquitous that we are instantly drawn to images that change the point of view.  I laid down on my stomach to take this photograph and with that simple step changed a picture of some pretty flowers into something interesting.  We look at the stems as they emerge from the dirt and we can almost feel them pushing upwards.  Get high, get low, do what it takes to change your perspective in interesting ways.  The other concern I had was the very busy background so I stopped down to f/2.8 and got back far enough that I could shoot it at 200mm.  This longer focal length emphasizes and strengthens the effect of the shallow depth of field, turning the distracting background into a blurry field of dark tones.  When I took the photo I was thinking black and white because the the brilliant white petals but little did I realize how converting to B&W in Nik Silver Efex Pro would give the flowers a glow as if lit from within.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com