For the past 10 years, inconsistently at best, I’ve written here about my work. In an effort to improve my online presence, I’ve built a new website and am implementing some other changes as well. As part of those changes, I’ll be moving my blog to the new website to keep things in one place. Older posts will be kept here, but new posts will be there. I invite you to join me there, and subscribe to my new blog.
Visit www.rickberk.com/blog to continue with me on my photographic journey.
One of the nicer hidden gems along the coast of Maine is Bailey Island in the town of Harpswell. I’d never heard of it until I moved here and a few of my new friends mentioned it to me. I first photographed here in 2017, and returned a couple of times last year. I don’t quite feel like I’ve exhausted the possibilities here just yet.
Yesterday, I decided to return here because I hadn’t been in a while. I was hoping to photograph Mackerel Cove or the cribstone bridge at sunrise, neither of which I’d done before. The sunrise forecast looked promising earlier in the week, but as I woke up yesterday morning the report had changed and it was expected to be a dud as far as color in the sky went. I decided to switch to plan B and head to Giants Stairs, a short distance away. The tide would be coming in and the incoming storm would have the waters of Casco Bay churning up against the rocky shoreline.
The Giants Stairs trail follows a short stretch of rocky shoreline on the east side of Bailey Island. Named for the rock formation that evokes the look of a huge staircase, this trail overlooks Casco Bay. There are several areas of interest, including Pinnacle Rock, Giants Stairs, and Thunder Hole. There are several places to step off the trail and climb around the rocks, where waves crash against and wash over the rocks, creating all sorts of visual interest. Since the sky refused to cooperate and produced little in the way of interest, I focused on the patterns created by the water washing over the rocks, as well as the explosiveness of the waves.
I varied my shutter speed quite a bit to capture the violent motion of the water in different ways. At times, this meant using Benro Master Filters neutral density filters to cut the amount of light coming into the camera and enable me to use slower shutter speeds. It also meant adjusting my camera’s ISO as well to enable various shutter speeds. Thinking about the constant adjustments shot after shot kept me thinking the entire time I was there!
Despite all the thinking, when I’m in a location such as this, I always take some time to take it in, and enjoy the spectacular show Mother Nature can put on. It’s these displays that continually get me out of bed before the sun is up, just so I can witness it.
As always, my work is available for purchase at my website at www.rickberk.com.
Last week, I posted Part 1 of my year in pictures for 2018. This week, I pick up Part 2 in July. It’s really been an incredible year, personally and professionally for me. I hope all of you have a great finish to 2018, and an amazing start to 2019.
As always, my work is available at my website in the form of prints, home goods, and more. Check it out!
And now…. part 2 of my Best of 2018!
Have a great year!
As 2018 inches closer to the finish line, I always find it interesting and enjoyable to go back over the year through my photos, and remember who I was with, where I was, what I was doing, and what else was going on in my life at that moment. My images are very much a part of who I am, and while they may evoke different meanings for others, based on their own experiences at the places I photograph, for me, they are reminders of the accomplishments, challenges, and big moments of the past year.
2018 has been no different. Overall, 2018 was an incredibly good year for me. I did more exploring of Maine, found some new spots, revisited some old ones. Crossed Vermont off the list of states I hadn’t visited yet, and taught some workshops at some of my favorite locations.
This year, I found I had more photos than usual make the cut. I also wanted to give each photo some love and give a brief explanation of the image, so this edition covers from January through June. Stay tuned for part 2, which will be posted next week.
As always, all of my images can be purchased as prints at my website. Without further comment, here is 2018 in review, in chronological order:
The Nubble Lighthouse, in Cape Neddick, Maine, is a favorite for photographers, tourists, and locals alike. I first visited the Nubble 20 years ago on my first trip to Maine. It was a cold night in December and the full moon was up. There was snow on the ground and the Nubble was lit up for Christmas. It was magical, quintessential New England coast.
I took a few photos that night, on film, as I was three years from getting my first digital SLR, and unfortunately, I have no idea where those negatives are. But now that I live in Maine, I try to visit the Nubble every so often to try and capture something new.
It’s almost impossible to make a bad photo here. My preference is to photograph at sunrise, with the sky aglow and some color in the clouds, and when the tide is high to get dramatic waves crashing on the rocks. On this particular morning, the sky didn’t cooperate as I’d have liked, but the tide did. One of my favorite things is capturing water rushing over the rocks, so I tried a few compositions with varying shutter speeds to change the movement, and these were my favorites.
As always my work can be purchased at my website.
Ok… so… maybe I’m not the best at this blog thing. I’ve written here intermittently since about 2009, but haven’t really been consistent with it. The past two years I’ve tried to post more regularly, with varying degrees of success depending on what’s going on in my life. For the past few weeks, I’ve been going through images from 2018 trying to choose the best for my Best Of post to recap my year photographing. It’s fun for me to go back and look at images I made over the past year, and remember what life was like at those times.
As I was reviewing this year’s images, I realized that I hadn’t done a post reviewing 2015. 2015 was a pivotal year for me in my photography life. My career was totally turned upside down- I had left Canon USA the year before to join Lytro. For the first half of 2015, I criss-crossed the country training camera stores on Lytro’s cutting edge refocusing technology. While I was excited about this new tech, and their camera, I also still saw a place for traditional stills, so my Nikon (you read that right) was always with me as I traveled. In March 2015, Lytro threw up its hands, deciding that they didn’t have what it took to bring their ground-breaking technology to the photography world at large. I was kept around to help get rid of stock, but my time there was done by July.
So a good portion of this portfolio represents time when I was on the road for Lytro. And the rest is what I did after Lytro gave up and cut all us photo types loose, thinking they could make more headway developing for virtual reality instead. Spoiler alert: They didn’t.
2015 became a crossroads of sorts for me. My landscape work took noticeable steps forward. I saw a lot of personal growth, stemming from personal trials and tribulations. But I’m still here, still clicking, still growing. It’s amazing how much things can change in three years.
As always, my work is available for sale at www.rickberk.com.
Without further ado, in no particular order, my best of 2015:
I know I just posted something like this a few weeks ago, but once again Fine Art America and I are offering free shipping on all U.S. orders, from November 22 through November 26. It all ends midnight EST on November 26th. Just one more thing to be thankful for!
To browse images and place an order, visit my website at http://www.rickberk.com.
While I’m at it, I want to thank all of my supporters who have purchased my work, or otherwise enjoyed viewing my images online. It means a lot to me that my work strikes a chord in people, whether I know them personally or not. I wish you all a happy and healthy Thanksgiving and holiday season.
When I first began traveling to Maine 20 years ago, Portland Head Light was one of those places that was just magical to me. The natural beauty and the aura of the lighthouse perched atop the rocky shore, waves pounding below, make it such a draw for photographers and tourists alike. One of the things I feared when I moved here was that, having this landmark in such close proximity would somehow diminish its meaning to me, and I would begin to take it for granted.
Just over two years after my move, I am happy to report that my fears were unfounded. I still love photographing the lighthouse, and the surrounding landscape, as often as I can. In many ways, having it so close by is too easy, and I must force myself to look elsewhere to capture the Maine landscape, for fear of overdoing it at Portland Head.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at work and noticed the sky was setting up for what could be a really beautiful sunset. Big puffy clouds, breaks in between, bright sun, and best of all, high tide with a full moon surf that meant big breaking waves on the rocks. My beautiful fiancée was kind enough to run my camera bag to me at work and once my shift ended, I raced over to Portland Head Lighthouse to capture the sunset.
I arrived 15 minutes before sunset and quickly made my way to the spot I envisioned for my shot. I knew, if the waves were big, I wanted to get a spot where the crashing on the rocks would be prominent. I also knew this one angle would allow me to face back to the west just a bit, to get the color from the setting sun in the shot. I scrambled over the rocks and made my way out to my perch. By this time, I only had a few minutes of light left, so I quickly started making some images. Since I was short on time and light, I concentrated on my first composition and just timing waves, trying to get the perfect wave on the rocks. After a few minutes I had one that I liked, so I changed lenses, and shifted my composition slightly to get something a little different. Where I was, I didn’t have a lot of room to change my angle, so the changes in composition have more to do with zooming than anything else.
As soon as I got my second shot, the park closing warning began, so I packed up and made my way home.
If you would like to support me and my art, consider purchasing a print or other item with my image on it at my website.
I don’t like to do too much overt advertising here, but Fine Art America, where my images are available as prints and more, is offering free shipping all weekend, starting today through midnight Sunday!
To take advantage of this, all you need to do is visit Rick Berk Artwork Collections and find an image you like! For an added bonus, only for readers of my blog, use code BBFTRJ to receive an additional discount. Don’t wait, the offer ends Sunday night at midnight!
Before I moved to Maine, one of my favorite places to visit was always the Old Port in Portland. The mix of old architecture, restaurants and boutiques made it a must whenever I traveled to Maine for business or pleasure. The centerpiece of the old port for over 100 years the United States Custom House, straddling the area between Fore Street and Commercial Street, right on the waterfront.
The Custom House was built between 1867 and 1872, designed by Alfred B. Mullet, who was the Supervising Architect of the Treasury from 1865 to 1874. There was a need for a new Custom House after the Great Fire of July 4, 1867. The fire had destroyed 1800 buildings in the center of Portland, including the Exchange Building, which had housed the customs office, post office, and several other federal offices.
While I had often admired the building from the street, I had never photographed it. I could never find the right angle, or find a time when the street wasn’t filled with cars parked at the curb. Just by chance, I was in the Old Port one day and happened to park in a parking garage and noticed that I had a clear line to the building with no wires overhead. The next step was picking the right time of day.
From the angle I had on the roof of the parking garage, the waters of Portland Harbor and the islands in Casco Bay were plainly visible. I also knew that the sunrise would be visible behind the building on a clear day, and I assumed the streets would be relatively clear early in the morning. I arrived just as the parking garage opened and made my way to the roof and set up. All I had to do was compose, and wait.
I decided a graduated neutral density filter would help balance the exposure between the sunrise in the sky and the darker foreground of the Custom House, so I used a a Benro 4-stop Hard Edge Graduated Neutral Density filter, and placed the transition exactly on the horizon in the background. This allowed me to open up the shadows on the face of the Custom House and still maintain the orange glow that was present in the sky, that the camera would have lost on its own without some help.
I had planned to also take some images from street level, but by the time I completed my work on the roof of the parking garage, a truck had parked itself in front of the building, making it impossible to get a clean shot, so I called it a successful morning and headed to find some breakfast!
Explorations Through The Lens 
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