I told you, blue and orange colours within the same picture would be my favorite colour contrast. When seeing this bike in the middle of all those colourful leaves, I just couldn't resist.

However, I'm not fully happy with this image, as it feels very nervous. While this is obviously due to the large amounts of tone mapping I applied during post processing, reducing the effect makes the leaves on the ground look much more boring.

... that's what getting this shot was like! While the main objective of this image is to show the architecture around this location, having a totally empty place (free of people) would have rendered the entire scene too static. I wanted some pedestrians to cross the scene and I decided for an exposure time of about a sixth of a second for getting them nicely blured.

Even at 10mm focal length, a hand-held exposure time of a sixth of a second seemed pretty long on a 1.6 crop camera (yeah, no tripod as usual). I, hence, crouched and pressed myself against a wall, getting my knees to form a (more or less) solid underground for my camera.

It took me about 10 exposures (and 20 minutes of waiting — everybody seemed to have disappeared by that time) for getting people about where I wanted them. Everytime people got by and heard my 30D's mirror flip, they turned around and got some excuses: "Whoops, sorry for getting across your frame!!" Funny that people never get the idea to be an "important" part of the image...

As wheather turned out to be better than expected, I was out on the streets last weekend for some more shooting. I spent about an hour (until my camera's batteries went dead) at the "Karlsruhe Schlossplatz", which is located right next to Karlsruhe Castle.

After half an hour I had about a handful of "potential keepers" when suddenly my 30D refused to release the shutter. While my first thoughts were something like "Yay! At last! A reason for getting the 7D!" a quick glance at the display revealed something like "CF Err"... Aw, crap! No 7D and all today's images lost!

With a freshly formated CF card, I restarted from scratch. A couple of minutes before I already had found a nice subject and had an idea how to shoot it. However pedestrians kept on crossing my frame, so I had to proove patience. While waiting for people to move on (it took about 8 minutes to get the area free of people), I kept on looking around — and all of a sudden, this guy with his camera showed up, trying to get a picture of all these arcs.

And what about my originally intended picture? As I said, after 8 minutes of waiting and freezing I eventually got the shot, but: Back home, it turned out blurry... The 30D's preview definitely sucks at maximum magnification since it only shows some upscaled and interpolated low-res thumbnail, which lets you pretty clueless about the true sharpness of your shot!

Thought the autumn series had ended? No, not yet: I found another detail shot of the colourful wall that I didn't want to miss here!

After posting so many autumn images in the past days, I just felt like adding some monochrome architecture today.