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.
Filed Under (Photography, Sweden) by henrikj on 19-11-2008
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.
This is a shot from a photowalk in Wildcat Canyon Regional Park with my friends Jeremy, Skip and Olivia. I actually don’t have any memories at all of making this shot.
I used a Lightrrom preset called Twisty Fries for the post-processing. The preset greatly increases both the blacks and the fill light. The constrast is also increased using the tone curves. Also, the hue for the red and the orange is increased but the saturation is decreased. A purple tint is applied to balance the changes in both the hue and the saturation. To bring forward the green, the vibrance is increased. No vignette has been added, but I made a small crop. In the end, I think the result is fairly good.
Despite a couple of very sore calfs from an 18.5 mile cross-country running race, I went out to photograph the magnificent autumn colors last Sunday. I had a great time walking around in Uppsala and as I approached our 16th century castle, this old Chevrolet drove by me. I barely managed to get this snapshot before it had passed me. The post-processing was straight-forward and serves as a good exemple that you don’t always need to apply all of those fancy techniques. First, I increased the clarity and saturation quite a bit. I also boosted the contrast using both the tone curve and the blacks slider. To lighten up the wall, I had to add some fill light and increased the illumination of the red and orange tones. Because the back of the car was a bit overexposed, I had to use the recovery slider. As a final touch, I made the blue tones a bit darker.
Royal Arch Cascade is one of the lesser known waterfalls in Yosemite Valley, despite its impressive 1250 ft drop. The water volumes are quite low and the fall is usually dry by June. The fall is not that easy to spot – the low flow makes it hard to see the fall from a distance and it’s often shielded by trees when you get a bit closer. This also makes it hard to get a good shot of the fall. From far away, the fall will be small and hard to spot in the photo. If you venture closer, the trees makes it nearly impossible to get a good composition. When you go all the way to the bottom of the fall, the lighting conditions are very bad. The bottom is usually in deep shadows while the upper part is in full sun light.
This is a hand held shot of the base of the fall. I used a shutter speed of 1/10s to get the water to blur a bit. The composition turned out nicely, and I didn’t find any crop that I think can enhance the shot. The upper left of the shot was a bit to dark, and I used the new adjustment brush in Lightroom 2 to locally increase the exposure. As I usual, I increased the contrast with the tone curve. I also had to add a bit of fill light to get the lighting I wanted. Finally, I’d liked the photo to have a warmer feel. I made some changes to the hue for the yellow and orange tone. The stone now had the color I wanted, but the water felt cold and had a slightly blue tone that didn’t fit into the general feeling of the photo. To remedy this, I applied the same yellow/orange tone to the highlights as I use for my sunsets shots. After the change to the highlights, the color tones of the water matched the tones of the stone.
This is a macro of saw blade. I tried several different compositions and angles and this photo turned out to be one of the best.
As I’ve written before, I use Lightroom as my main tool for processing and organizing photos. One of the features that I initially found to be hard to use was the split toning functionality. Using split toning, you can add separate color tones to the highlights and the shadows. The implementation in Lightroom 1.x was quite bad, but I major improvement was made for Lightrom 2. Instead of using sliders to select the color tone, you now pick it from a color map. This makes it much easier to use split toning and to select the exact color tone that you want to apply.
For this shot, I added a combination of red and yellow to both the highlights and the shadows. The tone applied to the highlights are slightly redder and a bit more saturated than the tone for the shadows. I also increased the contrast and made some changes to the hue. As you can, I also cropped and tilted the photo.
A great spot to photograph San Francisco, Berkeley and the Bay Area is Grizzly Peak Road. The road follows the ridge above Berkeley and it’s quite easy to find. Along the road, you can stop at several turn-outs that offer slightly different views of the Bay. The view of the San Francisco skyline at night is fabulous. However, you’ll probably want a telephoto lens if you only aim for shots of SF.
For this occasion, in May 2007, we arrived some time before the sunset. I made some shots with my Pentax DA 18-55mm zoom lens before switching to the Sigma 75-300mm. With the telephoto lens, I managed to get some decent photos of the SF skyline as the sun was setting. Unfortunately, the wind picked up and it was really hard to get sharp photos as the light started to fade, using a tripod and image stabilization didn’t help much. In the end, I only got a single night shot that you might call decent.
Fast forward to the present day. I decided to play a bit with one of the initial wide-angel shot that I made just before the sunset. First, I slightly underexposed the photo. I then added some more black and used the tone curve to make the sky darker (by decreasing the light tones). By now, the foreground was way too dark and I was forced to add some fill light. Next, I changed the hue for both Orange and yellow to make the sky more appealing. As the final step, I used split toning to make the highlights really glow by adding a blend of yellow and orange. The result: a fake sunset that looks pretty real – as long as you don’t study it too carefully.
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.
