One thought came to my mind while putting this together: I am thinking about the way we take photos these days. When I started, I always carried my trusty Canon EOS 500D with me, when I wanted to take photos. It's still with me today, but I carry it around a lot less often. At the same time, I also take a lot more photos with my smartphone. That's something I used to avoid, because I disliked the quality and the tendency to take photos thoughtlessly. Maybe I should rethink this opionion. Especially with my preference for framing motifs the right way and exploring perspectives, I don't even focus overly much on the more technical aspects. This could be a way to rediscover photography for myself, because it is more easily available and also removes some hurdles. And I have to admit...phones take seriously good photos these days thanks to their automated post-processing capabilities. Even though it still feels a bit like "cheating" to me to not do everything myself.

I'll have to dig deeper into this and maybe experiment a bit more. Maybe I start with a dedicated album for phone shots here and compare over time, if I notice a difference.

Differences compared to Lightroom:

• No subscription model, but a fixed price license for two installations
• Overall is slower and some features (e.g. spot removal) take quite a while
• Exporting images takes much longer
• Features are easier to access, overall a lot less menus to navigate
• Settings are more obvious and easier to use, especially as a casual user

The most significant difference is probably that Luminar 4 is clearly built with ease of use in mind. It is not meant primarily for power-users and professionals. I think they could get used to it, but in my experience so far it doesn't feel like it's built for them. However, I'm quite happy with the results so far and managed to do everything I used to do in Lightroom before just fine.

I personally quite enjoy the black and white conversion tool and I don't remember that Lightroom offered something similar. You can not only convert your image to B/W in one click, you can afterwards adjust all color channels and define their intensity and even decide to return color saturation to one of them. While I'm sure you can do the same in Lightroom, I think there it is a lot more involved.

Always a fun option to have are their AI Sky Replacement and AI Augmented Sky features, which allow adding elements like clouds very conveniently to a photo or even replaces the entire sky with a different sky. Definitely a bit gimmicky, but a nice option if you're (like me) not very experienced in using Gimp, Photoshop or similar.

I think if I was using it every week, I might consider going back to Lightroom. But for my current and foreseeable needs this is the right tool.

Above you can see the original, unmodified photo. When I look at it, I immediately notice a couple of things:

• The sky is a milky, boring nothing
• There are not enough different colors, so everything feels a bit too green
• The photo itself feels quite muted, mostly due to the direct sunlight on that day

But there are definitely some nice aspects about this photo as well:

• A nice separation of the photo through the strong line in the reflection
• The reflection itself is awesome, thanks to the super smooth water
• The tree gives the photo tension, a bit of a story almost

So, all in all I thought this photo could be something. I messed around a bit with boosting the colors, adjusting the brightness and contrast and more. But somehow the negative aspects remained and the result looked quite unappealing to me:

What you can see here is that the sky looks definitely better. The colors are popping more and it just overall feels more alive. But I still think that somehow the beautiful reflections are not really in the center of the image. And there is still too much of a uniform green tone to the entire photo, which keeps me from really enjoying it.

(If you have a hard time spotting what I'm talking about, click the image and then you can switch back and forth between them by swiping or using your arrow keys.)

So, looking at all the nice contrast and strong edges in this shot, I decided to try turning it black and white. Here is the result:

What I love about this is that the tree is still there, but is less obvious and doesn't distract as much from the reflection. The sharp line running through the reflection stands out more and the repetition of the sky in the water seems more emphasized to me. This conversion has totally transformed the mood of the scene.

Going black and white with a photo has some immediate consequences: While in post-production you often mess around a lot with the colors, trying to make them pop without turning them too artificial...the moment they are gone, this is not a concern anymore. Therefore it becomes possible to fully focus on the brightness, bump up contrast more than normally possible and go more heavy on some settings that in a color photo normally would be a no-go.

One thing to always keep in mind about black and white photography is: It's more abstract from the reality and therefore much easier to accept as a piece of art rather than a representation of reality. This automatically gives the photographer more license to experiment, because the viewer wouldn't notice it as disruptive or "wrong".

There are of course more black and white photos from me to be found on this website.

As you can probably imagine, I focused mostly on the old city, as it has all the beautiful sites and is very pedestrian-friendly. In fact, the entire area surrounding the castle, Ljubljana grad, is a pedestrian area. The castle overlooks the city from its perch on one of Ljubljana's hills. It is well worth a visit, as it is filled to the brim with Slovenia's and Ljubljana's history and has a tower with a 360° panorama of the entire city and its surroundings.

At its feet, the Ljubljanica parts into two river arms that flow around either side. The old city follows one of the arms almost for its entire length and thus consists mainly of the riverside promenades with lots of restaurants and cafés. The centerpiece is the Prešernov trg with its three bridges, the Prešeren monument and the Cerkev Marijinega oznanjenja, a Franciscan church from the 17th century.

Aside from the nice landmarks Ljubljana is also a very interesting city to visit. It is a cultural melting pot with influences from all the neighboring countries especially, but as a European capital city with a university it also attracts people from all over the world.

For my last day-trip I decided to follow up on a small remark in my travel guide. It recommended visiting the Velika Planina , a high plateau in the Kamnik Alps that is home to a small sheepherders settlement. So, I drove to the valley station (at about 500 meters) of the cable car that would bring me up to the lower rim of the high plateau at about 1,350 meters. From there it is normally possible to take a chairlift up to the top, but I had just missed the end of the season. So, I took an unexpected hike up there to the top station of the chairlift, which sits at about 1650 meters.

From there you have an absolutely beautiful view of the mountain panorama and down over the wide plains of the Velika Planina with its characteristic traditional herdsmen huts. I was there in October, so the sheep had already been brought down to their wintering grounds and most of the settlement was empty. This, however, increased the intense feeling of peace and serenity I felt up there.

Now that I have been there, I can definitely understand all the good things I had heard about Slovenia. It is a small, but really interesting and beautiful country with so many different things to see. Hopefully my photos have given you a little glimpse and made you add Slovenia to your list of places to visit. I am certain that I will be back.