Shutter-life|Adaptive photography and more, by Henrik Johansson

During my visit to the Bay Area last year, I never got the opportunity to shoot the magnificent skyscraper at 444 Market Street in San Francisco. This year, I’d made a promise to myself to not repeat that mistake.

Wikipedia has the following entry for the building:

The Shaklee Terraces, or 444 Market Street, or One Front Street is an office skyscraper rising on San Francisco’s Market Street in the Financial District. The building, completed in 1979, stands 538 feet (164 m) tall and has 38 floors. The Shaklee Corporation used to be headquartered in the office tower until the company moved to Pleasanton, California in 2000.

However, nothing in the Wikipedia entry describe the building’s fantastic architecture. The lines are amazing, straight and gently curved at the same time. The colors are perfectly matched. The possible variations in perspective are unlimited.

When you shoot the building, try to avoid the middle of the day as chances are that you’ll get a rather annoying backlight. Mornings are probably the best, followed by evenings. During my first visit - an afternoon - I’d some problems with blown highlights on the left (western) part on the building as it was directly exposed to the sun.

For this shot, I increased the contrast using both the contrast slider and the tone curve in Lightroom. I slightly decreaed the impact of the blue tones by slightly increasing the color temperature and decreasing the blue saturation. I also cropped out the portion of the photo where the sky was showing. No special or advanced post-processing at all, just ordinary stuff. However, I made one thing that in my option really increased the impact of the shot - I flipped it vertically. Instead of looking up, it now feels like you are looking down on the building. To highlight this effect, I use the an identical crop in the before image below.

During my visits to the Bay Area, I did several photowalks. I shot this building in central San Francisco, probably close to the Montgomery/Sutter intersection. I tilted the camera to create a diagonal through the photo, but some cropping and a little rotation was still needed to align the corners. I had a faily bright and low contrast b/w in mind when I started the post-processing. I increased the exposure by quite a bit and I also fiddled with the brightness of the individual colors. Unfortunately, I felt that the final result was bland. To add some dynamic to the photo, I used the new graduated filter in Lightroom 2. I put the darkest spot in the upper left corner and aligned the filter with the corner of the building, i.e. the diagonal. For the filter, I applied a two step underexposure.  I also added some clarity to bring out the details in the darker part while keeping a lower contrast in the brighter lower right-corner. Finally, I had to tune the overall exposure a bit to get nice balance between the dark and bright parts.

Yosemite National Park is a paradise for nature photography. Many places for great photography in the park are easy to get to, while others can involve long hikes (like shooting Half Dome from Indian Rock). A few seem to be almost unknown. During spring time, Vernal Fall is one of the most impressive water falls in Yosemite. Thousands of people make the hike up the Mist Trail every day. Yet, only a handful make it the most scenic spot along the trail. A spot more beautiful than you can imagine. A spot that Ansel Adams used for some of his photos.

Most people that hike the Mist Trail stop at the bridge where Vernal Fall is visible for the first time. A minority continues toward the fall and even fewer make the full hike to the top of the fall. While all of these people will experience great scenery, almost every one will miss out on this truly awesome spot. After hiking about two thirds of the distance to the bottom of the fall (where the steep section begins), look to your left for an opening in the woods. You will see some large and flat rocks that reach out into the stream, just 100ft from the trail. If you look closely, you will also see some faint traces of a small trail. Leave the trail and marvel at the scenery. If possible, do this hike a spring morning. The big mist cloud will be filled with rays from the rising sun. It’s a truly amazing sight that few people will ever experience.

The photo at the top of the post is from late March this year. Besides converting it to sepia, I only did some minor adjustments to the contrast. The photo in b/w is an older photo from last year.

This is my last post for a while. Tomorrow, I will travel to Lofoten in northern Norway for hiking, climbing, and photography.

This photo is from the Botanical Garden in Uppsala, Sweden. The Botanical Garden was founded over 350 years ago and it’s the oldest one in Sweden. It is situated just west of the Uppsala Castle. In 1787, Uppsala University received the garden as a gift from the King Gustav III. Today, the garden houses about 13000 species.

The flower is from the newer part of garden where flowers and plants from the whole world are show cased. One can spend considerable time in just a small part of the garden since the possibilities for photography are virtually endless. Beside the flowers and the plants, the architecture and the layout of the garden also gives able room for great photography.

For this flower, I wanted to enhance the prominent stamens. The petals were very flat, making the stamens rise above them. I used the Canon 100/2.8 Macro and tilted the camera somewhat to shot the flower from the side. I should probably have used a smaller aperture since the rear of the stamens are somewhat out of focus.

For the post processing, I used a Lightroom preset call RAW_Sepia, available at Inside Lightroom. I increased the clarity a bit and made a small crop and rotation. The preset uses heavy vignetting that in my opinion works well for this shot.

In March, I attended a computing conference in Atlanta. I stayed at the Marriott Renaissance just outside downtown. When I booked my room I requested a room on one of the higher floors. As luck turned out, my room was not only high enough, it also had the window in the right direction. I did quite a lot of photography from the balcony (e.g. Like an alien cure) but nothing was like the sunrise on my final morning. Not only was was the light beautiful, but some clouds also added some drama to the scene.

For this particular shot, I used the same preset as for You hold a special place in my heart. I played around a bit in the grayscale mixer, changing the luminance of some colors. Using the tone curve, I also increased the contrast a bit. Since the shot is also really attractive in color, I could has well have retained it in the processing. I have several similar photos and will probably process them in color.

This photo is also from Morgan Territory Regional Preserve, a bit north of Livermore, California. As usual for my Livermore shots, I was out on a bike ride. This time I’d decided to try out the trails that traverses Morgan Territory. I knew of the hilly nature of the area, but I could never believe that the trails actually went from one hill top to the other. And they always went the shortest way. Often the trail was way too step for biking, I even had a hard time of pushing my bike upwards. In a mile, the trail could gain or loose several hundred yards of altitude.

I stopped for a break on the top of the highest hill. As I sat down and admired the views, I noticed some small purple flowers in the grass. For a different persective, I put the camera on the ground and aimed it slightly upwards to capture one of the flowers from below.  It’s quite hard to get a nice composition since you can’t look through the view finder. In some situation, you could benefit from live view, but in this case the display was angled down, towards the ground.

The photo turned out nicely, but I wanted to do something to enhance the small flower and it’s color. I removed all colors except for the purple and magenta. After desaturating the colors, I had to use the dust tool to remove some small spots with residue color since I wanted the flower to be the only object with color. Finally, I used split toning to add a slight tone of red/yellow to the shadows.

This tree is special to me. Last year, it was the subject for what I think was my first real quality photo. The tree is located in Morgan Territory Regional Preserve, north of Livermore, California. Instead of using the short route, I first biked to the top of Mt. Diablo. I then continued down and around the mountain before starting the climb back through Morgan Territory. As I approached the highest point, I suddenly fund myself inside the clouds. Everything became dull and mute. At the top, just before leaving the park, I saw this lone tree standing majestically, surrounded by the mist.

This year, I made it to the tree three times. The shot above is from my first visit in April. I had biked through the hills of the park (ok, I pushed my bike since the trails always went straight up the extremely steep hills). Before biking home, I naturally stopped for some shots of the tree. The light was ok for the time of day, but far from great. Because of this, I decided to try out some presets i Lightroom. The preset that I liked best is called Vergilbt/Gilted and it creates a golden effect. You can download it for free at Inside Lightroom. I also made the photo a bit lighter and removed some branches from the ground.
The photo turned out to be my most popular yet on Flickr, with a rank pending between 7 and 25 on Explore.

Yesterday was a great day. First, the photo above received the first fave100-award on Zooomr for reaching 100 favs. While I really like the photo, I never imagined that it would be this popular. Next, Thomas Hawk published a link to the photo on FriendFeed. On FriendFeed it got quite a lot of likes and a number of people started to subscribe to my feed. Back on Zooomr, the photo gained over twenty new favs. The current tally is up to 126, amazing!

Early evening, I got a mail from Photrade telling me that someone had left a comment on one of my photos. Photrade is a photosharing site where you can sell your photos and you also get a part of the site’s ad revenue. Since a couple of people on Zooomr had uploaded photos to Photrade, I uploaded some as well last weekend. However, I didn’t check out the site and I don’t know much about it or their business plan. I logged in to check on the comment, and man was I surprised! Photrade had selected one of my photos as their “Featured photo of the week“. They had also made a very nice write-up about the photo. I didn’t see this one coming at all, a very nice surprise!

The only bad thing of the day was the announcement of the Nikon D700. Why must I be shooting Canon?

I’m not worried at all, originally uploaded by henrikj.

I found this old wind mill between Livermore and Tracy, close to the Altamont Speedway. I first started to photograph an abandoned and rusty water truck at the base of the wind mill. Just before leaving, I decided to also shoot the wind mill. However, my only lens was the 100/2.8 maco and it was mounted on my old Canon 40D, giving me a focal length equal to 160mm (my other stuff was in the car, on the other side of a fence). Because of the focal length I was unable to get the full wind mil into the frame, even when I walked back quite a distance.

Even though the afternoon light was pleasant, I decided to enhance it a bit in the post processing. To get a somewhat more golden tone, I used the split toning functionality in Lightroom/Camera RAW. A highlight value of about 50 corresponds very well to the last rays of the sun, resulting in a nice golden tone. I also added a subtle and a bit more red tone to the shadows. For sunset shots, you can also increase the color temperature to get a warmer feeling.

Original:

Welcome to shutter-life. This is the place where I, Henrik Johansson, will write about my photography. I plan to not only publish photos, my aim is to also tell the story behind them. I feel that this aspect is often missing in many photo blogs. When I see an incredible photograph, a number of questions immediately pop up. Where and when was the photo taken? How was it taken?  How did the photographer think before the shot? How was the photo post processed?  That are questions like these I’ll try to answer when I post.

Enjoy!