You’ll know it, and if not, you’ll know it right now. It really matters how you convert a three channel color photo (RGB) to black and white.

I shot this one this morning on my way to work with the new 14mm Sigma lense. The sky was a little bit red toned, with bluish cloud stripes. So the only way to get details in the sky without reducing the global contrast I want here, is to exaggerate the red channel and lower the blue and green channels. So I get the subtle differences in the sky out.

I used the channel mixer from UFRaw to convert this RAW file twice with different settings. The first one is just desaturated. The second one is the result of tuned channel mixing. As a side effect the red trailer and the red hubs of the tractor
turns bright (what is fine) and the blueish damp — bluish because of the blueish dawn light — disappears a bit (what is not what I intended). So If I would present this photo somewhere I probably would combine both images or do some selective adjustments in a way to get the damp of the desaturated image into the channel mixed.

There are tons of tutorials out there targeting black and white conversion including channel mixing and other methods. There is a one from Adobe, from Cambridge in Colour and one especially for Gimp.

Of course, especially in this case, if you exaggerate the red channel, you’ll run easily in difficulties with noise and broken gradients. This is because in daylight the sensor of a DSLR typically captures relatively a lot of green, some blue and a very little amount of red tones. And stretching the red channel over the whole tone range like I did here leads to gaps in the histogram.

This is explained in this libraw article, including a possible workaround. Very interesting.

We passed a few days in the swiss alps around new year. We stayed in Thun, near Interlaken in the Berner Oberland and went for excursions in the Jungfrau Region. It was great. Actually, this region is part of the UNESCO cultural heritage “Jungfrau - Aletsch - Bietschhorn”, the most glaciated part of the Alps.

Really great snow and wonderful wother. And in spite of my ISO mistake (I forgot to turn it down to 200 and let it at 1600 the first day after new year’s eve…) I got some not so bad pictures I want to share here. The ISO performance of my new Nikon D90 is not bad. There is a noticable difference im comparison to my D70s I used before.

I took some series to build panoramas, too. And this is the most beautiful one I think. I spent some time in creating sharpening masks and blur masks to reduce the noise in the sky (caused by my ISO 1600…) without losing details. And at least for this size it works I think.

Panorama of Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger

This is the view over the Jungfrau with Mönch and Eiger on the left of the panorama. The very left one is the Eiger.

Eiger Nordwand and a schematic map of the region

They built a cog rauilroad called “Jungfraubahn” from little Scheidegg to the Junfraujoch, which is a hotel, a restaurant and certainly a great panorama viewpoint. They call it “Top of Europe”, although the hightest european mountain is the Montblanc. Anyway, the railroad they built in 1912 is quite impressive as they even made a station or two with windows in the Eiger Nordwand! We did not go up as it is really expensive to go there. The cablecars to the places whe went were expensive enough. But I want to go some day. Hopefully with a similar weather.

We had the chance to watch a roaring avalanche on the other side of the valley. It was quite far away and in the shadow. The sound needed a few seconds until arriving to our side of the valley. Nevertheless impressioning. We were on the way down with sledges from little Scheidegg (over 2000m) (which is directly in front of the Eiger Nordwand) to Wengern.

The weather in the valley was ugly. Cold, dark and gray. But as we went up we encountered with the sun. I love those seas of clouds! The clouds were at about 1300m, which is exaclty the altitude of Wengern. The upper village had nice weather, the lower part had really bad and cold weather. You can see this on the third photo of the three below. This was the upper limit of the clouds. A few meters below the temperature dropped noticable.

High fog in Wengern

The last day we visited Thun and Bern. I published one of the photos of Bern in a previous blog entry.

Another one of the photos I took in Frankfurt. Not sure if I really like this photo. Hope you like it.

Winter in Frankfurt

RAW processed with UFRaw, adjusted and sharpened with Gimp.
This photo on Flickr

I was in Frankfurt city yesterday and I had a look on the Main, which is frozen a few dozens of kilometers upriver. As the day before was the first day for almost two weeks when the temperature climbed above 0°C it seems the some of the ice broke and drifted downstream.

Leaving the ice

It was snowing.

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.