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

About a month ago, I visited Lofoten Islands in northern Norway. The islands enjoy the midnight sun for about a month each year, as Lofoten is situated quite a bit north of the arctic circle. The area is extreme beautiful with mountains and fjords dropping steeply into the Atlantic Ocean. The hiking and climbing is nothing short of spectacular.

This photo of the midnight sun (the sun is actually behind the small island to the right) was shot from a small pier at our camping. Instead of going for the natural colors in the photo, like I did in this shot, I decided to try out something different. I played a bit with my presets in Lightroom and one of them seemed just right (ST High Contrast 1, available at Inside Lightroom) for this photo. Except for the split toning preset, I only made some minor changes to the contrast and the brightness of the photo. The hardest part was to find a suitable crop since the shapes of the two islands tended to not work together.

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.