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

Enough is enough, originally uploaded by henrikj.

When we walked along the beach on Fuerteventura less than two weeks ago, we noticed some beautiful sun rays. I find it hard to made good photos sun rays, especially over water, since the image often needs some more element than just the rays and the water. This time, I noticed some branches in the vicinity and I put one of them in the image as the main object. I used f/9, but since the branch was quite close, the rays is out of focus which adds to the photo in my opinion.

Watch this world for me, originally uploaded by henrikj.

There’s a lot of photos of the magnificent Horseshoe Bend. This is one of mine. The clouds over the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument provided a nice backdrop this day.

Single shot, no HDR. Canon 17-40/4L at 17 mm on my venerable 5D Mk.I.

Log in, originally uploaded by henrikj.

This is a view upwards in the Hyatt Regency atrium in San Francisco. The hotel is a great spot for photography, especially when the holidays are approaching since they put a huge installation with a lot of Christmas lights in the atrium. On one of the upper floors, there’s also a an emergency exit that leads to a nice view of the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge. However, you need to be careful since it impossible to open the door from the outside.

Destinations, originally uploaded by henrikj.

This is a photo from one of the most beautiful and toughest hikes that I’ve ever done. If you see a trail on a Norwegian map, you should never expect that it’s actually there in real-life – especially when you could really benefit from it (like areas with dense mountain birch or marshes).

In the photo, you can see the the lake Kongsvatnet (kings’s Lake/King’s Water) and Svolvaer, the main city on Lofoten.

Alone, originally uploaded by henrikj.

Round Valley Regional Park is one of those great parks with a lot of lonely trees and wonderful hills. Well worth a visit.

Expectations, originally uploaded by henrikj.

One drawback with vising Yellowstone in May is the abundance of steam that often hides the spring/pool/geyser that you’re trying to photograph. Still, there’re good photos to made, and the amount of color hidden inside the RAW files are often enough to save a photo.

No change of heart, originally uploaded by henrikj.

This is a photo of a coyote in Yellowstone National Park. Talking to some other photographers, we realized that we were a bit late as we missed when the coyote hunted for rodents lived below the snow. After slowly approaching us for about five minutes, the coyote became visibly disturbed by the people that had gathered in the vicinity and ran away.

House of Payne, originally uploaded by henrikj.

One of the things that I enjoy the most when I post-process images is that I’ll might not know what I’ll end up with. Of course, for most images, I know what I want to achieve but for some images I just like to play around in Lightroom. I got a quite large collection of presets and I just let the cursor move over them and while I look at the small preview window. For the vast majority of the presets, the result is awful but once in a while get some really interesting results that makes an excellent basis for further post-processing.

This is one of those images, an ordinary view from a hotel window in Atlanta that was transformed into something completely different.

Hard to reach, originally uploaded by henrikj.

My phone rang during dinner yesterday. As soon as I picked up the call, my friend, the professional architecture photographer said:

- I’m going out shooting. You want to join me?
- When, where? I’m having dinner right now.
- It’s a secret. I’m picking you up in half an hour.
- Ok.

Thirty minutes later, we’re heading out in his car. To be honest, I’m quite impressed with myself since I’ve both managed to gather all of my essential night shooting gear and to put on a couple of extra layers of clothing.

I’m expecting that we’re either heading out in the nature or to some for me unknown overlook. I’m completely wrong. We’re going to the new roundabout that the city just finished building.

I’ve passed the roundabout just a week before, but I only noticed a few stones. Now, the stones are lit by brightly colored lamps and there’s a fountain playing in the middle. And the moon is almost full.

In the photo below, I positioned the moon at the top of the fountain.

ISO100, 28 mm, f/10, 30s.

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.