Riga Latvia

[Manfred M]

I'm starting to process some of the images I took on my trip to the Baltic States in May. Here are a few shots of Riga, Latvia, taken during the evening "golden hour".

1. The Orthodox Cathedral





2. The Lutheran Cathedral





3. The Freedom Monument





4. Shot of the Old Town part of RIga





5. Detail of mural in image #4

[Wavelength]

Brilliant shots

[Mike Buckley]

Very nice, Manfred, especially the light and framing in the first one.

Does the roof line of the Lutheran Church really slope as much from left to right as in the photo? I ask because other details of the image look as if you struggled a bit with perspective distortion.

[Manfred M]

Very nice, Manfred, especially the light and framing in the first one.

Does the roof line of the Lutheran Church really slope as much from left to right as in the photo? I ask because other details of the image look as if you struggled a bit with perspective distortion.

Purely distortion Mike. I wish I had taken my perspective correction lens along with me, but did not, so I've done what I can with post and I worked on the verticals only. The shot was done at 24mm on a FF camera, so there will be a bit of distortion, based on the angle I had shoot at.

[ionian]

Nicely done Manfred - the first image in particular feels alive with colour and beautiful light.

[ccphoto]

I am sure somewhere inside of me there's a screw either loose or stripped that thinks that all architectural shots should be in B&W and the first one of this group screamed so loudly, it rattled the rest of the screws. Just a thought. It is a lovely cathedral and it does look nice in color...but oh, B&W...yummy, yummy.

[Manfred M]

I am sure somewhere inside of me there's a screw either loose or stripped that thinks that all architectural shots should be in B&W and the first one of this group screamed so loudly, it rattled the rest of the screws. Just a thought. It is a lovely cathedral and it does look nice in color...but oh, B&W...yummy, yummy.

Chris - I have a slightly different view on this.

I paid a lot of money for a camera that can capture pretty well any colour that a human can see. I've paid a lot of money for a computer screen that is AdobeRGB compliant and a high end colour photo printer that exceeds the AdobeRGB colour space. When I post to the internet, I convert my images to sRGB, i.e. up to some 16.8 million distinct shades that covers about 1/3 of what humans can see. If I convert to B&W, I set all my colour channels to the same value so that gives me a total of 256 shades; pure black, pure white and 254 shades of gray.

That explains why my "default" mode is to work in colour. I need a very good reason to throw away that much data in my work. I sometimes do; my guess is in about 5% - 10% of my work. The reason I will do so is for compositional reasons, i.e. one of the most powerful compositional techniques I know of is "simplification". I need a very compelling reason for throwing away that much colour data, and in these images, I simply don't see the need, so I did not do so.

[Donald]

Beautiful compositions, one and all. And indeed, glorious colour.

As a B & W photographer, in the main, I'm not sure that I'd have gone for that composition of the Orthodox Cathedral as a B & W. I take Chris' point, but I would have thought all that bulk of foliage on the right hand side had too limited a tonal range to think of that as a B & W image, albeit it you could work a lot of dodging and burning into those leaves. I am certain there are other shots of that building that would definitely have me thinking B & W.

[Shadowman]

Nice compositions, never enough real estate to fully capture the architecture.