Some Pictures of Pfaffendorf Castle in UV

[Kai]

Yesterday I visited an old castle in the most beautiful sunshine and took a few photos.
The main building is around 500 years old and is still inhabited and used today. It was built of dark bricks and looks pretty gloomy (in the visible area ;)

Find more information on: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Paffendorf

Have fun looking at the pictures :)

Technical data of the pictures:
Camera Canon 6D-FS, lens Canon EF 2.8 28 mm, filter ZWB2 plus two QB21. All handheld, 3200 ASA, f/4.5, shutter speed 1/30s WB on tar road, HSL color wheel rotated 180°.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[colinbm]

Very nice Kai.
Cromwell left these standing.
Woops, wrong country.

[Nate]

Great shots Kai! That Canon handles high iso pretty good.

[Andrea B.]

Kai, this is a very enjoyable series.

Aside from the UV which is wonderful, it is also cool to see something unusual which we don't have here in the US like this lovely old castle.

 

And, you handled the perspectives very well.

[Alaun]

Pfaffendorf lol ;-)   
 

Well and Fine captured! 

Did you get pictures from the park as well, IR would be ideal now during spring?

[Andy Perrin]

Very nice! What a fantastic castle.

[OlDoinyo]

The architecture looks almost Hanseatic. Good, sharp images, although not showing a lot of chromaticity. Not clear if that is the subject matter or optical train. 

[Andy Perrin]

Almost certainly the subject matter, OlDoinyo. How often do we ever get any chromaticity out of stone? Usually the only time I can think of is when there is lichen on the stone.

[Cadmium]

Very nicer photos! Great castle! I really like these pics. :-)

 

[photoni]

18 hours ago, Kai said:

lens Canon EF 2.8 28 mm, filter ZWB2 plus two QB21

maybe it's all these glasses that caused flare in some photos ... did you have a lens hood?
Beautiful photos perfect for UV.
I wonder what red bricks would look like with IR !

[Kai]

Thank you all for your kind comments!

@Colin: That's right, Cromwell acted a bit more western ;)

@Nate: Yes, the EOS 6D is very low-noise due to the relatively low resolution of just over 20 MPx. Up to 3200 ASA, the images can be denoised almost perfectly, 6400 ASA are also very easy to handle.

@ Andrea: Yes, that's so nice about our community that we span the whole world and thus also cover an enormous range of cultures :)

@ Alaun: Didn't take any IR photos of the park even though there are very nice Sequoia trees there. I took color photos there. But I also took a lot of IR pictures of the castle.

@Andy: Yes. I love ruins as well as well-preserved castles and palaces. Are really very romantic :)

@ OlDoinjo: Here in the Rhineland and on the Lower Rhine, a lot seems to have been built with bricks. Yes, the sharpness of the lens is amazing (for UV). From aperture 4 the pictures are usable, from 5.6 they are good.
Just looked through the originals. Yellow color edges appear in the corners with high contrasts. Since I cropped the images to 5x4 and 2x1, these areas largely fall out.

@ Cadmium: Thank you ;)

@ Toni: Because of the filter stack (1x 52mm plus adapter plus 2x 77mm), the lens hood no longer fits. Sometimes (if I notice it in time) I shadow with my hand or stand in the shadow.
In the IR, the castle looks less gloomy, much more fairytale-like. Is something completely different - but also very good! Here are two examples. In the original, the IR images are at least twice as detailed as the UV images (due to much better lens).

[photoni]

I like it a lot with both UV and IR
IR seems to me a "nocturnal... moonlit night"
If you increases the brightness and contrast, the UV photos look alike IR , apart from the sky and the leaves.

[Kai]

3 hours ago, photoni said:

 

Yes, the stones appear similarly differentiated in the UV and IR.  I didn't expect that originally.
How bright you want to display a UV photo is probably a matter of taste. Almost all substances – especially organic substances – absorb comparatively large amounts of UV. So the world in the UV is a pretty dark world. I took the sky as a reference and adjusted the brightness so that it didn't become homogeneously white. That's why all the objects (here) seem pretty bleak to me.

[dancingcat]

TIL (today I learned :-)) that Sequoia species existed in Germany before the Ice Age.  I tend to think that S. gigantea and S. sempervirens  are limited to the US in California where I grew up.  As a kid I contributed to the "Save the Redwoods" drive in the 1950's with pennies in milk cartons to help preserve the old groves from loggers. We were only partially successful.   It's good to see seeds were taken around that time and cultivated in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldenkirchen_Sequoia_Farm.  Must be pollen in core samples in Europe have turned up Sequoia sp. waaay long time ago.

[Kai]

Thanks for your hint!
Yes, it is amazing that sequoias once existed in this country. Well - there were also mammoths ;)
[This joke doesn't seem to work in English. We call Sequoias "Mammoth Trees".]
Pfaffendorf Castle is located near a lignite mining area. There are remains of the Sequoias. There is a corresponding reference to the Sequoias in the park of Schloss Pfaffendorf (https://www.strasse-der-gartenkunst.de/bergheim-schloss-paffendorf.html):
"The palace has a 7.5-hectare park that Baron Ludwig von dem Bongart had laid out in 1861 in the style of an English landscape garden. Extensive areas of water and numerous distinctive individual trees, including old sequoias, ginkgoes and giant cedar trees, characterize the picture. A forest teaching garden conveys this an impression of the flora of the Tertiary, the geological era in which lignite was formed. Two 15-million-year-old Sequoia stumps flank the entrance to the palace park as remnants of primeval flora. Their high natural content of tannic acid prevented decomposition for millions of years, so that they were found in good condition in an opencast mine."

[Cadmium]

Kai, I really do like your castle pictures. I especially like the first one best. Thanks for sharing them.

 

[OlDoinyo]

I find myself looking at the windows to see if I can see anything through them, looking for possible polycarbonate guard panes. Some of the upper windows clearly do not have such, but I am unsure of the lower ones.

[Kai]

@cadmium
I am happy if you like my picture. We are discussing an incredible number of technical details and the resulting possibilities here. I think you have to realize these possibilities from time to time :)

@OlDoinyo
Sorry - I can't say for sure. The sensitivity of the camera sensor ends at 360-365 nm for the camera used here. I assumed that the PC is still completely transparent there?