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

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.