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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
