A photo I took in Bern, Switzerland a few days ago. It was cold and the street was icy. The beautiful old town on the peninsula surrounded by the river Aare is an UNESCO cultural heritage. I like it very much and it is very photogenic, even on cold and gray days.

Bern, Gerechtigkeitsgasse

I really had a hard time with this photo. There are so many subjects in here which could have survived fine as their own (cropped) photo perfectly.

• The girl crossing the street (you can even see the white in her eyes at full resolution).
• The bernese facade of the houses, including the christmas trees.
• The two man carrying the christmas tree over the street.
• The typical bernese chimneys.
• Or just he high heels on the icy ground.

Nevertheless I decided to leave it as it is. This is the original framing.

This photo on Flickr.

The thermometer of our neighbours showed -12.1°C. This thermometer is just at the outside of the wall. The coldest night in the last seven years in Hesse. My fingers get too cold riding (by bike) my 2 km from the train station to work that it hurt. We had about -17°C outside the villages.

But the sunrise was fascinating. A shame that I have no time to go to a place to take pictures of the industrial zones near here. With those temperatures the smoke of the chimneys looks impressive.

Well, at least not the high Active D-Lighting settings.

I set the Active D-Lighting in my D90 to “Extra High” some day and I did not change it since then. I am shooting RAW and JPG in the highest resolution for now so I can compare the JPG produced by the camera software and the RAW directly.

The first photo is a crop of the in-camera JPG. As you can see, the Active D-Lighting is creating a halo in the sky around the very bright area. The Nikon software is trying to produce a kind of pseudo HDR tonemapped image here. I played with the curves in Gimp a little bit (not much) enhancing the contrast.

The second photo is the RAW processed with ufraw. Don’t care about the sharpness, colours, exposure as I used different settings. But it is obvious that in the RAW file is not affected by the Active D-Lighting halo effect.

Don’t care about the noise here neither… I forgot to set down ISO to 200 and shot whole day with 800… shit. Although, the huge amount of the photos is usable (which would not have been the case with my previous D70s).

As conclusion: There are cases where Active D-Lighting is great, if you don’t want to process RAWs and you are taking pictures of scenes with high contrast. But care that you don’t leave it as your default setting!