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

During my visits to the Bay Area, I did several photowalks. I shot this building in central San Francisco, probably close to the Montgomery/Sutter intersection. I tilted the camera to create a diagonal through the photo, but some cropping and a little rotation was still needed to align the corners. I had a faily bright and low contrast b/w in mind when I started the post-processing. I increased the exposure by quite a bit and I also fiddled with the brightness of the individual colors. Unfortunately, I felt that the final result was bland. To add some dynamic to the photo, I used the new graduated filter in Lightroom 2. I put the darkest spot in the upper left corner and aligned the filter with the corner of the building, i.e. the diagonal. For the filter, I applied a two step underexposure.  I also added some clarity to bring out the details in the darker part while keeping a lower contrast in the brighter lower right-corner. Finally, I had to tune the overall exposure a bit to get nice balance between the dark and bright parts.

This photo is also from Morgan Territory Regional Preserve, a bit north of Livermore, California. As usual for my Livermore shots, I was out on a bike ride. This time I’d decided to try out the trails that traverses Morgan Territory. I knew of the hilly nature of the area, but I could never believe that the trails actually went from one hill top to the other. And they always went the shortest way. Often the trail was way too step for biking, I even had a hard time of pushing my bike upwards. In a mile, the trail could gain or loose several hundred yards of altitude.

I stopped for a break on the top of the highest hill. As I sat down and admired the views, I noticed some small purple flowers in the grass. For a different persective, I put the camera on the ground and aimed it slightly upwards to capture one of the flowers from below.  It’s quite hard to get a nice composition since you can’t look through the view finder. In some situation, you could benefit from live view, but in this case the display was angled down, towards the ground.

The photo turned out nicely, but I wanted to do something to enhance the small flower and it’s color. I removed all colors except for the purple and magenta. After desaturating the colors, I had to use the dust tool to remove some small spots with residue color since I wanted the flower to be the only object with color. Finally, I used split toning to add a slight tone of red/yellow to the shadows.

Yesterday was a great day. First, the photo above received the first fave100-award on Zooomr for reaching 100 favs. While I really like the photo, I never imagined that it would be this popular. Next, Thomas Hawk published a link to the photo on FriendFeed. On FriendFeed it got quite a lot of likes and a number of people started to subscribe to my feed. Back on Zooomr, the photo gained over twenty new favs. The current tally is up to 126, amazing!

Early evening, I got a mail from Photrade telling me that someone had left a comment on one of my photos. Photrade is a photosharing site where you can sell your photos and you also get a part of the site’s ad revenue. Since a couple of people on Zooomr had uploaded photos to Photrade, I uploaded some as well last weekend. However, I didn’t check out the site and I don’t know much about it or their business plan. I logged in to check on the comment, and man was I surprised! Photrade had selected one of my photos as their “Featured photo of the week“. They had also made a very nice write-up about the photo. I didn’t see this one coming at all, a very nice surprise!

The only bad thing of the day was the announcement of the Nikon D700. Why must I be shooting Canon?

I’m not worried at all, originally uploaded by henrikj.

I found this old wind mill between Livermore and Tracy, close to the Altamont Speedway. I first started to photograph an abandoned and rusty water truck at the base of the wind mill. Just before leaving, I decided to also shoot the wind mill. However, my only lens was the 100/2.8 maco and it was mounted on my old Canon 40D, giving me a focal length equal to 160mm (my other stuff was in the car, on the other side of a fence). Because of the focal length I was unable to get the full wind mil into the frame, even when I walked back quite a distance.

Even though the afternoon light was pleasant, I decided to enhance it a bit in the post processing. To get a somewhat more golden tone, I used the split toning functionality in Lightroom/Camera RAW. A highlight value of about 50 corresponds very well to the last rays of the sun, resulting in a nice golden tone. I also added a subtle and a bit more red tone to the shadows. For sunset shots, you can also increase the color temperature to get a warmer feeling.

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