Believe it or not and despite having had a bad throat for a couple of days, I couldn't resist those amazing autumn colours that have been evolving withing the past weeks. Before uploading my latest shots, however, comes one more image from Hong Kong's top of the Peak!

I didn't get much to editing and retouching lately, so despite having gathered some new ideas of subjects to shoot, updates and new images got pretty scarce in the past weeks. Today, however, one of my colleagues drew my attention to small wooden crosses having appeared on the campus of the University of Karls... ehrm, sorry: the KIT's South Campus (waha!), informing everybody that one of Germany's important universities has "passed away". So why not get a spontaneous shot of these, as this would be something different and a good occasion for getting my 30D out of its bag again...

Oh yeah, speaking of my Canon 30D: I meanwhile got pretty tempted by replacing my beloved camera with a brand new 7D as the latter features so many updates:

* Better AF
* 100% view finder
* Live view
* Highres display
* 18MP
* Video

Still, I'm perfeclty fine with my 30D, so 1500 EUR seems lots of money!

I don't know who got the brilliant idea of putting an orange windowed building right next to a blue windowed one... but the contrasts and all those reflections are just fantastic, and since its my favorite colour combination I kept this shot as a souvenir...

Even after years of digital image editing I, sometimes, still are surprised to discover what colours may be hidden in images, that appear dull at a first glance. In case of this image, I was truely lucky that my 30D perfectly exposed the shot "to the right" without blowing the highlights in the sky. As a result, the sky contained incredibly fine graduations of blueish and redish tones, since clouds were lit by the setting sun beneath a crystal blue sky.

These colours, however, were not visible initially, since all (12 bit) R, G and B channel values were close to saturation: As they were showing values above 1024, they were mapped to more or less the same tonal range (about 232 up to 255) while applying the usual gamma correction and converting the linear sensor data to an 8 bit output. By skipping those in-camera processings and stretching the curves even a little more, I was able to find a better mapping of the initial highlight range (1024 - 4095) to my 8 bit working space and, thus, retrieve all those colours from the sky.

So why does shooting RAW help here? Imagine I would have taken my "out of the camera" JPEG file, which already would have contained the camera's gamma correction and sensor data conversions. In order to retrieve the sky's details and get those punchy colours and contrasts, I would have had to stretch the JPEG's tonal highlight range (232 - 255, i.e. 23 values) to, let's say, 64 - 255. The result would have been heavy posterization and a highly noisy sky. Using the RAW data, however, I had a much larger tonal range (1024 - 4095, i.e. 3071 values) to be mapped to 64 - 255: No posterization, but a smooth, clean sky instead!

I found another shot from the monastry on Lantau Island that shouldn't be missing here...