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

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.

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.

During my visit to the Bay Area last year, I never got the opportunity to shoot the magnificent skyscraper at 444 Market Street in San Francisco. This year, I’d made a promise to myself to not repeat that mistake.

Wikipedia has the following entry for the building:

The Shaklee Terraces, or 444 Market Street, or One Front Street is an office skyscraper rising on San Francisco’s Market Street in the Financial District. The building, completed in 1979, stands 538 feet (164 m) tall and has 38 floors. The Shaklee Corporation used to be headquartered in the office tower until the company moved to Pleasanton, California in 2000.

However, nothing in the Wikipedia entry describe the building’s fantastic architecture. The lines are amazing, straight and gently curved at the same time. The colors are perfectly matched. The possible variations in perspective are unlimited.

When you shoot the building, try to avoid the middle of the day as chances are that you’ll get a rather annoying backlight. Mornings are probably the best, followed by evenings. During my first visit - an afternoon - I’d some problems with blown highlights on the left (western) part on the building as it was directly exposed to the sun.

For this shot, I increased the contrast using both the contrast slider and the tone curve in Lightroom. I slightly decreaed the impact of the blue tones by slightly increasing the color temperature and decreasing the blue saturation. I also cropped out the portion of the photo where the sky was showing. No special or advanced post-processing at all, just ordinary stuff. However, I made one thing that in my option really increased the impact of the shot - I flipped it vertically. Instead of looking up, it now feels like you are looking down on the building. To highlight this effect, I use the an identical crop in the before image below.

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 from the Botanical Garden in Uppsala, Sweden. The Botanical Garden was founded over 350 years ago and it’s the oldest one in Sweden. It is situated just west of the Uppsala Castle. In 1787, Uppsala University received the garden as a gift from the King Gustav III. Today, the garden houses about 13000 species.

The flower is from the newer part of garden where flowers and plants from the whole world are show cased. One can spend considerable time in just a small part of the garden since the possibilities for photography are virtually endless. Beside the flowers and the plants, the architecture and the layout of the garden also gives able room for great photography.

For this flower, I wanted to enhance the prominent stamens. The petals were very flat, making the stamens rise above them. I used the Canon 100/2.8 Macro and tilted the camera somewhat to shot the flower from the side. I should probably have used a smaller aperture since the rear of the stamens are somewhat out of focus.

For the post processing, I used a Lightroom preset call RAW_Sepia, available at Inside Lightroom. I increased the clarity a bit and made a small crop and rotation. The preset uses heavy vignetting that in my opinion works well for this shot.

In March, I attended a computing conference in Atlanta. I stayed at the Marriott Renaissance just outside downtown. When I booked my room I requested a room on one of the higher floors. As luck turned out, my room was not only high enough, it also had the window in the right direction. I did quite a lot of photography from the balcony (e.g. Like an alien cure) but nothing was like the sunrise on my final morning. Not only was was the light beautiful, but some clouds also added some drama to the scene.

For this particular shot, I used the same preset as for You hold a special place in my heart. I played around a bit in the grayscale mixer, changing the luminance of some colors. Using the tone curve, I also increased the contrast a bit. Since the shot is also really attractive in color, I could has well have retained it in the processing. I have several similar photos and will probably process them in color.

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.