Common Sense and Whiskey

Trains Get the Treatment: Wednesday HDR

These four train photos came back from an August trip, and we put 'em through the Photomatix mill. First two are tourisy/kiddie trains, the top on the waterfront in Helsinki, where the "party boats" leave nightly for Stockholm (note the Silja Line ship in the back), and the next one (with a sleeping driver) is an irritating little train that will keep getting in your way as you walk through the old town in Tallinn, Estonia.

*****

Both ways, coming and going from the lovely little Alpine town of Mürren (pictures in the Switzerland Gallery) we had to change in Speiz, a town on the Thunersee that I know nothing about beyond its train platform. With ten minutes of dead time, why not haul out the Nikon and see what you can come up with?

The work flow is pretty much the same for all of them. First fixing obvious problems in Photoshop Bridge, then tonemapping in Photomatix, then the bottom three all involve extracting one or more objects in Photoshop CS5, desaturating the rest of the image, and then recombining. The bottom uses a Duplex filter from Nik Software, too.

These are in their respective countries' galleries (Finland, Estonia, Switzerland) at EarthPhotos.com, and in the HDR Gallery, currently home to 279 HDR photos. Click 'em to make 'em bigger.

Panorama: Switzerland

Panorama of the Bernese Alps from Murren, Switzerland. The lights at the distant left are the village of Lauterbrunnen. The snowy peak on the left is Mt. Eiger (3970 meters, or 13025 feet). You can make this much bigger or really huge.

Farmhouse HDR, Switzerland

In the Alpine village of Murren.

Travel Day

More about Belarus (top) as soon as we decide a little better what to think about it. For now, we've just arrived at the Hotel Eiger, Murren, Switzerland. View from the balcony, bottom.

All photos here.

32 or 33 yesterday, 12 now. Besides the temps, these are two pretty different places.

Train Wreck

 

Maybe or maybe not in line with our recent note about the European heat wave:

The Japan Times: "Local media in Switzerland pointed to the possibility that the rails might have been distorted by a sudden temperature change, saying the weather cooled down abruptly during the past several days following a hot spell. The Tribune de Geneve said in its online edition that a number of passengers rushed to one side of the train trying to take landscape pictures just prior to the derailment."

Whatever it was, that's awful. And we're watching because we'll be on that train in a few weeks.