Longwood Gardens B&W

After a long break from posting photos, here comes the first post of the new year!
Last year we visited Longwood Gardens, a beautiful park near Philadelphia PA. Originally purchased from William Penn himself by the Peirce family to be an arboretum, well known industrialist Pierre Du Pont purchased the estate in the early 1900s and extended it greatly. The park is open to public and features beautiful landscaping, a very large and diverse conservatory, as well as herb gardens, ponds with waterlilies and many other highlights. If you haven't been there, give it a try. It is worth it.
To make it more interesting, this post will focus on black and white pictures. I will show two photos from when we visited during daytime, both of which are HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. These mainly go to show that HDRs not only result in saturated and popping colors, but also provide beautiful black and white pictures which feel more alive due to the increased dynamic range. The remaining pictures are night time pictures, mostly taken shortly after sunset on Christmas day.

Here we go:

 This HDR of the italian water garden is one of my favorite B&W HDRs. The added dynamic range results in great detail in the lawn and the surrounding trees, which brings the scene to life. For all engineers out there: you can see copies of the blue prints, drafted by Mr. DuPont himself, in the park's restaurant.

The entrance to arguably one of the most beautiful and diverse conservatories I have seen so far. I really like how HDR allows you to get a clear view trough the windows and see the plants inside the conservatory. The contrast of the scene is further enhanced by darkening the sky (i.e. reducing luminance in the blue spectrum of the original color photo).

Since we visited during Christmas, most of the trees in the park were lit by colorful chains of lights at night. The tree in this picture is a very prominent example.

Another example of lit trees with the shilouette of the conservatory visible on the right.

This photo shows the rose nursery. Christmas lighting in the form of bright stars light the nursery from the inside and make the architecture visible at night.

Going on up inside, the ornamented glass ceiling and lit chandelier in one of the halls piqued my interested.

Look at all these jars full of sweets and candies. Although I really like sweets, they looked too colorful even for me. It really felt much healthier once I took some color out of this picture :-)

Now, how could you have a post with photos you took on Christmas without the picture of a Christmas tree? Although I wasn't quite happy with how this photo came out, the slight lack of sharpness actually combines well with the tree lighting and gives the tree a nice ambience.