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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
