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

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.

What a price to pay, originally uploaded by henrikj.

I’m really sorry for the lack of updates during the last two months. I’ve been busy with a lot of things, including the writing and defence of my PhD thesis.

This photo is from a bouldering session in The Real Hidden Valley in Joshua Tree National Park (there’s also a place in the park named just Hidden Valley, but I’ve got no idea why this one above is the real deal). The colors in the sky were amazing, sometimes orange and yellow and sometimes purple. As a bonus, the moon was full. As ususal, I’ve played a bit with the color temperature and the tone curve. I’ve added some fill light and blackness and added some yellow to the highlights in the sky.

This is a yet another sunset photo. The lake is called Torasjärvi and it’s located in Lappland, Sweden, above the artic circle. At the shores of the lake is a remote old village that shares the name of the lake. Today, less than twenty people still live in the village. In the 1950s, the population was at least a couple of hundred. The father of one of my best friends was born in this village and they still owe the house that his family build when he was young. Today, they use it as a summer house. I visited the village in August and was immediately struck by the complete silence and serenity of the surroundings. I only stayed for two nights, but still felt completely rested when I left.

I will not dwell much into the post-processing of this photo, I applied the usual changes to saturation, contrast, clarity and color temperature. I will try to post a bit more often, at the expense of exhaustive descriptions of the post-processing. The post-processing posts will not dissapear, but they will become more infrequent.

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.

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.

Original: