Math Hurts

Sometimes math brings despair to the surface. Fuji X10 at f/6.4 1/20 ISO 400

I teach math now but I know how this feels.  When I was in high school I hated math and I was not really any good at it, not until grade 12 anyway.  Then I met Mr. Geddes.  Mr. Geddes was not your typical “Dead Poets Society” kind of teacher.  He was strict and demanding but I connected with him in a way that I hadn’t with any of my other Math teachers.  He helped me to see that there was a beauty and a truth in mathematics that could not be replicated anywhere else.  My parents still laugh when I talk about teaching math, they only remember all of those long and disappointing parent-teacher interviews with my former math teachers, but I think that that experience has helped to make me a better teacher.  One who understands how bone-crushingly confusing it can be to get your head around it all.

I had a student this year who loved art but hated math.  She would come to class with the most amazing drawings and sketches and one day she drew a skeleton in ink on her hand.  It was absolutely remarkable that her love of art and hatred of math would come to the surface in one wonderful moment so I took out my little X10 and shot a couple of photographs of her.  I processed the image into the dark tones and with greater contrast to heighten the mood and to pull the skeleton drawing up off her hand.  I then added a vignette to the edges to help remove distracting details and tighten the focus on to my subject.

-Russell Berg 

The Voyage

Group photos don't have to be posed and boring, they should tell an interesting story. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm f/13 1/400 ISO 400The journey always starts with more questions than answers and that is the beauty of it all.  Stepping out your front door and on to the road that leads… well it can lead you anywhere; is a step away from the things that you accept, know and trust and into the unknown.  Travel opens the mind and expands the senses, we see new people, smell new food, experience new lives and we know that we will not return unchanged and that is wonderful.

Finding a way to tell a story with your image can draw people in and make the whole thing more interesting.  The deck of the Coho Ferry that runs between Victoria, BC and Port Angeles, WA is an interesting place for a little group portrait.  I took a few standard photos of people looking out over the deck towards the horizon but they were rather uninteresting and didn’t really have much to say.  Then I noticed the ships lines laid out on the deck.  I laid down with a very wide angle lens, closed down the aperture to keep everything in focus and composed the frame so that the lines lead your eye directly to my friends and family.  Even though you cannot see the ocean the wide angle lens gives a sense of expansiveness that bespeaks the ocean and the movement of your eye as it follows the ropes to the subjects gives the image a dynamic quality.

-Russell Berg

Benetton

Three friends lie on the deck of a ship talking as the ocean washes by. Konica DiMAGE Z10 20 mm f/3.4 1/640 ISO 64

The deck was only place where air was moving.  The boat moved slowly through the equatorial waters and inside the heat was unbearable.  Even here the humid air clung to your body.  

I was walking on the upper deck of a ferry in Indonesia with a group of my students as we headed out to the jungle to do a service project.  I looked down and saw three friends laying on the deck.  They were in scattered positions and as I watched the came together to produce a very interesting composition.  The open and engaged attitude of the two girls on the left pulls in the girl on the right who appears to be listening.  I really liked the position of the black girl’s hand, in fact the photo really is about their hands rather than their faces

Portrait of Friends

Portrait of friends. Canon XSi EF 50mm f/1.4 at f/4 1/40 ISO 200

They look at each other and a smile is made in the moment between two sentences.  Their smiles begin, pause, and crack into laughter.  They each know the story that the other is remembering without having to acknowledge it with much more than a smile and a tilt of the head.  The friendship was born in sandboxes and sleepovers and now it is something different, something stronger.

I was doing headshots for a couple of young actors and two of them wanted to do a portrait together.  They were clearly good friends and I wanted to pose them in a way that reflected that.  I had the girl on the left lean in and touch heads, that little bit of contact seemed to speak clearly to me of their friendship.  At camera left I had a flash in an umbrella to balance the fill from a large window at camera right.  I was really happy with the way the catch light from the window is reflected in the eye of the girl at left.  They seemed to be suppressing the laughter that rises from the memory of a funny story and I was very happy to be able to capture that moment.

-Russell Berg

Alone

I wait for my wife in a late night hospital hallway. Fuji X10 7mm f/2 1/30 ISO 125

My wife and I have recently gone through a difficult time as she experienced some serious health problems.  At one point I was struggling with questions of what it would mean to have my life change in radical and significant ways and the questions didn’t have easy answers.  I found myself spending a lot of time in hospitals and one night, late at night, I was waiting for my wife to come out of surgery and I realized that I was all alone in a long bare hallway.  I understand that there is something self-indulgent about self-portraits but I realized that I had an image here that expressed the things that I was feeling.  The worry, the uncertainty, the stomach churning anxiety as you wonder and helplessly watch this person you love the most suffer and struggle for breath.

To get the image I put my camera down on the floor in the centre of the hallway and set the self-timer.  Setting the camera on the floor had the effect of strengthening the perspective and it put the vanishing point right in the centre of the frame.  There is a sense of movement down the hallway, movement that is pulling me along without my ability to exert any control or influence.  It was that sense of helplessness that I was feeling and wanted to express in this image.  The X10 has a fast f/2 lens so even in the dim hallway I was able to get a decent image.

-Russell Berg