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

This May, I got the opportunity to visit Grand Teton National Park during a couple of days. The Teton Range is very impressive and I had really looked forward to photograph them. Unfortunately, we had bad luck with the weather. When it didn’t rain, the sky was usually covered with an uninspiring clouds.

We visited allthe usual places, including the Snake River Overlook made famous by Ansel Adams’ iconic shot “Tetons and the Snake River”. I made a number of shots at this classic location, but the bad light and the clouds resulted in a lot of rather photos.

Fast forward to the post-processing a few days ago. Although I thought it impossible to achieve something possible to show people,I opened up one of the shots and started playing in Lightroom. The light and the clouds made the choice to go black and white very easy. I more or less randomly started to change parameters since I didn’t know where to start working. Somehow I found that a very cold color temperature worked well for this shot, especially for the foreground. However, the clouds were to bright and contained very little detail. The same held true for the mountains. To remedy this, I used a graduated filter with a hefty negative exposure (1,5 steps) together with a reduction in the brightness. I also made general increase in the blackness and added some contrast. After these changes, a few areas lit by sunshine in mountains where to bright, making it necessary to use both the recovery slider and an adjustment brush to darken them. Finally, I added some fill light to bring out the details in the foreground and some clarity to give the whole image a bit more punch.

In my opinion, the resulting photo is quite good, especially when you consider the unprocessed RAW-file below.

Letting go was never easy, originally uploaded by henrikj.

Horseshoe Bend just outside of Page is a great place to visit. The Colorado makes a full 270 degree bend deep down in the canyon in front of you. If you got a wide-ange lens, the scenery can result in spectacular images. Unfortunately, most of these images tend to look the same. For this shot, I put the focus on the small shrubbery just before the drop-off. I used the smallest possible aperture on my lens to get a more shallow depth of field and blur the two raft in the lower left. The blur increases the percepted distance to the rafts and gives a better felling of how far below they are.

My case is easy to see, originally uploaded by henrikj.

My friends Sofia and Gustav standing on Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park. For this shot, the use of the graduated filter Lightroom greatly enhanced the look of the sun.

Obviously, this rater tight shot of the Taj Mahal has been post-processed rather extensively. I wanted to make use of both the centered position of the Taj and the bland sky. The original tones in the Taj was good but the sky was simply boring. I applied two angled graduated filters in Lightroom, one from each of the upper corners. I applied different colors to the two filters and more or less used a trial-and-error approach to find the tones. Normally, I would say I used to much color but I think it works in image. The choosen colors also resembles the Indian flag. However, the original colors in the photo interfered with the colored filters, which made me lower the saturation quite a bit. The interference also made me increase the color temperature and use split toning on both the highlights and the shadows (around 30 on the highlights and 40 on the shadows), partly resulting in the color cast in the lower part of the image. Finally, I increased both the contrast and the blackness in the photo.

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.