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.

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.