spirea and grass

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it was time to revive my old acquaintance with black and white again. the spirea in the garden made up for a very patient subject matter, and the setting sun provided me with lovely backlight. removing the color information at first seemed a bit disappointing because the impression of the complementary contrast of pink and green, reinforced by the simultaneous contrast through the backlight, has a strong quality of its own.

but as paul maxim said in his post the seduction of color, sometimes the impressive color quality can cover subtle shapes and patterns. for me those plant forms have this quality, but of course this is a subject that is present in photography since the very beginning. still for me it is a worthy topic to explore.

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sigiriya ruins

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late in the day the light was soft and the green regained its power after the blazing sunlight. the combination of the red rocks and the plants was very soothing, calming and inviting for a rest.

this is my first try with the beta of the new bibble5. its region feature allowed to keep the shadows in the center away from pure black while the environment was darkened half an f-stop to compensate the effect of 'exposing to the right'. this way the picture is less noisy an richer in tonalities in comparison to a shot where big parts are in the left half of the histogram.

the old bibble4 id did like because of its speed already, but the lack of region functions meant that selective editing had to be done in gimp afterwards (i am an all-linux guy), and therefore lightzone was the tool of choice for low iso shots - for high iso its denoising algorithms simply are not state of the art.

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