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

This is a photo of Lake Torasjärvi in the very north of Sweden. The shot was made just a couple of days after the midnight sun ended last year. The sun light was still present during whole the night, never giving the darkness the slightest chance to appear. When I made the shot, the sun had just dispappeared below the trees that surrounded the lake

For the post processing, I relied heavily on split toning - adding a dark blue cast to the shadows and a rusty color to the highlights. Otherwise, the post processing was simply, just some adjustments to the contasts and the use of the recovery slider to improvethe highlights in the upper part of the photo.I also made a slight crop toremove the horizon.

What a price to pay, originally uploaded by henrikj.

I’m really sorry for the lack of updates during the last two months. I’ve been busy with a lot of things, including the writing and defence of my PhD thesis.

This photo is from a bouldering session in The Real Hidden Valley in Joshua Tree National Park (there’s also a place in the park named just Hidden Valley, but I’ve got no idea why this one above is the real deal). The colors in the sky were amazing, sometimes orange and yellow and sometimes purple. As a bonus, the moon was full. As ususal, I’ve played a bit with the color temperature and the tone curve. I’ve added some fill light and blackness and added some yellow to the highlights in the sky.

I’ve said it before, split toning can turn a bland shot into something that’s really eye catching. When I saw some shots of jellyfish in a fish tank for the first time, I thought they looked spectacular. But the tenth time, the shots wasn’t that interesting anymore.

During a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I still had to make some jellyfish shots for myself. To make this shot of Pacific sea nettle jellyfish more interesting, I used split toning to add blue tones both to the shadows and the highlights.

Today, I decided to go through some old shots from last year. During a walk back in July at Old Uppsala, I made several shots of and a hover fly. I processed and upload one of best the shots quickly but left the others. Today, I convered one of the remaining shots to sepia, more or less by chance. I really liked the outcome, especially the petals and the bokeh. Nothing special with the post processing, some vignetting, used curves to increase the contrast, played a bit with the grayscale mix and I also added some black,fill light and recovery.

This is a photo of the rather large wind mill that’s overlooking the small town of Strängnäs in Sweden. For the shot, I used the longest possible shutter time. I carefully pointed the camera at the hub of wings. Just before releasing the shutter, I started to rotate the camera around its axis to create the illusion of motion blur. I won’t go into the details of the post processing, but I obviously used split toning and added a heavy vignette.

Last Sunday I went cross country ice skating with a friend on Lake Vendel, a bit north of my home town of Uppsala in Sweden. It was a clear and cold day. The temperature didn’t rise above -13C (9F) during the whole day. Unfortunately, the ice was covered with snow, enough to make the resistance more than a nuisance. Our speed were hampered, but we still managed to skate the length of the lake and back. At the far side of the lake is the Örbyhus Castle, where the Swedish king Erik XIV was murdered in the 16th century. On our way back we stopped and I made some photos of the reed at the shore. I only brought my compact, a Canon G9, both because of the weight and the consequences of an involuntarily bath. Fortunately, the macro mode on the G9 is pretty good.

For the post processing, I wanted to make the photo to convey a sense of cold. I performed some of the usual actions - I increased saturation and added some clarity and vibrance. To make the photo feel colder, I used split toning to add a blue tint to the shadows. I also added a slightly yellow tone to the high lights, which almost made the spots in direct sun light look pink. Finally, I slightly over exposed the photo and increased the blacks.

This is a shot of the Mercury Atlas rocket at the Rocket Garden, Kennedy Space Center. It was this rocket/capsule combination that brought John Glenn on Friendship 7 into orbit on February 20, 1962. The light was very harsh, making it almost impossible to get a good shot. When I started working with this one, I never thought the result would be something that I could actually show to other people. However, just a few very simple steps completely transformed the shot. First, I decreased the exposure with about one step and pushed both the fill light and recovery sliders to the max. This turned the blown highlights into something that actually looks like the sun (but it isn’t, the sun was much smaller). Next, I increased the color temperature quite a bit. Finally, I added the usual yellow/red tone to the highlights (about 50 on slider). Finally I did some minor tweaking using the tone curve, clarity, vibrance and saturation. I performed a minor crop and rotation. Looking at the original below, I find it hard to believe that it’s actually the same shot.

This is my 1,000th uploaded photo on Zooomr. It’s just a bit more than 18 months since started shooting with my first DSLR, a Pentax K100D. Since then I’ve made over 12,000 photos on three continents, completely upgraded my equipment two times, met a number of photographers that I’m proud to call friends, and my photos have been viewed over a quarter of million times and received at least 7000 faves. I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined this. To all of you - a big thank you. Your support has literally changed my life.

I shot this photo the past summer on Lofoten Islands, a group of islands located above the Arctic circle in Norway. The weather had turned foul on us fora number of days, making all climbing impossible. On our last day, the skies finally cleared again and we set out to climb Svolvaergeita above the town of Svolvaer. The climb was great, but due to the inexperience among a couple of us (including me), it took much longer than we anticipated. When we started to abseil down, the sun slowly disappeared behind the mountains. As soon as I reached the ground, I ran up on the steep mountain side opposite Svolvaergeita and shot this photo with my Canon G9. Note the abseiling climber a bit below the top.

This is a shot from the Monterey Bay Aquarium with some sort of herring (I think). The fish tank was small and cylindrical in shape. The water inside the tank was made to rotate, simulating a current. This made the herring school to decrease the power needed to withstand the current.

As you can see in the original below, the shot is a bit blurry and the blue tones dominte heavily. I used a preset in Lightroom that mimics an IR effect, hence the heavy green tint. I also dropped the color temperature, increased the clarity and the saturation and played with the tone curve to increase the contrast. The blue tones was made a bit darker. All of these changes made the photo grainy but I think the grain works nice here. I cropped the photo heavily and also made a small rotation to induce more movement in the photo.

This is a yet another sunset photo. The lake is called Torasjärvi and it’s located in Lappland, Sweden, above the artic circle. At the shores of the lake is a remote old village that shares the name of the lake. Today, less than twenty people still live in the village. In the 1950s, the population was at least a couple of hundred. The father of one of my best friends was born in this village and they still owe the house that his family build when he was young. Today, they use it as a summer house. I visited the village in August and was immediately struck by the complete silence and serenity of the surroundings. I only stayed for two nights, but still felt completely rested when I left.

I will not dwell much into the post-processing of this photo, I applied the usual changes to saturation, contrast, clarity and color temperature. I will try to post a bit more often, at the expense of exhaustive descriptions of the post-processing. The post-processing posts will not dissapear, but they will become more infrequent.