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

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.

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?

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!