The is the second photo in the contrail series. Btw I forgot to mention that all three photos are from the same place, Konigswinter.

In other news, I finally put together a rough portfolio of my favorite photos. It is just a stop gap thing until I develop something more to my liking so it is a little rough around the edges! You can find the link at the top of the main page of the photoblog.

Starting with today I’ll be posting three photos over the next three days centered around the broad theme of contrails. As you can probably tell, if you are a regular visitor here, I love these trails made by planes in the sky. In all three I’ve played around with the white balance so what you see is not exactly what I got. Having said that I still like how they have turned out although today’s photo is probably the one I least prefer among the three!

This was shot a few minutes after yesterday’s shot. I thought this would look good as a toned b/w although still not sure if the tone works or not.

Since I’m happy with one of my photos after quite a while I’m putting this up earlier than usual!

I had gone for a short walk the other day across a bridge over the Rhine to capture some very interesting cloud forms. Here is one of them.

I shot this through a train window yesterday.

I’m still trying to learn the art of pre-visualizing a shot before I press the shutter. I’ve miles to go before I can do that properly but this photo is one example of using that technique. I’m happy that it turned out exactly as I had wanted it to in the first place.

I’m feeling quite tired so I’ll keep it short. This is another photo from Konigswinter. Some might find the photo dark but I was forced to increase the contrast and decrease some brightness to make the third contrail stand out better.

Here is another photo from the same place as yesterday. Cloned out some very distracting shrubs from the bottom. I noticed after coming home that they were present in almost all the photos I shot from this point! For some reason I got a lot of noise in the shadows in this photo even though it was shot at ISO 100. I’ve seen this happen sometimes so am trying to see if there is a pattern to their occurence. Has this happened to any of you? Any obvious reasons I’m missing? Please email me (arthedains at gmail dot com) and let me know.

As I had mentioned yesterday, I got out of Cologne for a brief time yesterday evening to take advantage of the nice clear day. I went to Konigswinter which is a small town along the Rhine, roughly opposite the erstwhile capital of Germany-Bonn. It is something of a resort, lying as it does among the lovely Drachenfels, a mountainous range. My plan was to climb to the top of the tallest hill on the outer edge of the town and take some sunset photos of the breathtaking vista visible from up there. But as it turned out I was completely out of breath by the time I went a quarter of the way up! In my defence, it was a very steep gradient, at times the inclination reached 60 degrees I think! So I decided to put off the climb to the top for another day when I was better prepared and instead chose a vantage point from where the view was not so bad and clicked away. Here is the first one from that shoot. The river is of course the Rhine and the town below is Konigswinter. On the extreme right of the photo you can see a silvery round building. It is the tallest building in the state I live in.