adjusting/removing colour

I found this adjustable black & white tutorial while looking for ways of converting colour images into black & white. It's a completely new way for me but it works very nicely and allows much more room to play with hue, saturation and light, than for example the conversion using a gradient map (which is what I usually do).

Just a quick try, I'll have to try it out again later, and explore the possibilities.

Vienna, Staatsoper, May 2011

waiting...

... for the clouds to disappear, and the sun to come out, again and the temperature to raise a few degrees. For the the coffee drinkers and cake eaters.

Vienna, Graben, 29/05/2011

wiener würstl

This Würstelstand (wurst stand) in the centre of the city, near my hotel quickly became one of my favourite places during my long weekend in Vienna. You can get a whole range of sausages, but my alltime favourite is definitely the Käsekrainer - a sausage filled with melted cheese. Yummy! What I also liked is that you get your sausage not only cut in pieces, but it is served on a realy china plate, and not the usual paper/plastic one. So there's no rushing away, eating your meal while running around (although you can get a hot dog version with all sausages for this), but you have to take a few minutes to eat your sausage.

A digital colour shot, turned into b&w and with some slight contrasts and levels adjustments.

And with an added warm-up filter.

life in black & white

While writing a blog post about the prints of my first black & white roll of film in ages, I suddenly thought that wouldn't it be nice to have a separete blog just about black & white?

Black & white photography is something I've been wanting to explore for some time, be it converting digital colour images into black & white versions (and there are so many ways to do this) or shooting with good old black & white film (and maybe one day even considering doing my own developing) with my goold old Minolta Hi-Matic 7s II.

So here we go, my newly created blog dedicated to black & white.


There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds (G. K. Chesterton)


I'm not entirely sure if it's such a great idea to start another blog, when I'm already struggling to keep up with all my projects, Flickr, blogging, painting, art journaling, online classes etc. But we'll see how it goes. Right now, it just feels like a good idea :)