Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: black and white

This is the famous Becherovka distillery where until recently Becherovka, the famous Karlovy Vary herbal liquor, was made. It's now a museum of sorts, although when I asked them if they intended to open the old production line to the public they just said "no." This response seemed really arrogant at the time, but on the other hand the process is supposed to be a trade secret, so maybe it made perfect sense. They do have some cooking vessels for people to see, though. I don't know if they were used for fermentation, though, since the process (to the extent that they let people know about it) involves the addition of pre-prepared grain alcohol (unless I misunderstood their explanation), rather than using the brewing process to ferment the ingredients, which sort of makes the term "distillery" misleading. Incidentally, this is also not the original building, as although this location is authentic, this building was constructed later, albeit still in the 19th Century.

Here's a more conventional shot of Dolni Nadrazi. I'm assuming this is a Communist-era building, but I don't know its precise history.

This is another shot that's far from a "file photo" type of shot, that I took because I saw the opportunity to get a "depth-of-field" type of shot through this tree. Karlovy Vary has two primary train stations, Hlavni Nadrazi and Dolni Nadrazi, but it is possible to travel straight through both of them on the same train, winding down the hill from Hlavni Nadrazi to Dolni Nadrazi, seen here, although the center track in the picture is a stub end ending in a bumper just below the camera.

This was another shot that I kept because I ended up liking how it looked. I would have probably preferred a color "file photo" sort of shot here, but I had black and white film in my camera still, and this ended up being good enough to post anyway.

This photo isn't of anything special, but is the better of two shots I took from the train in Chomutov on the way to Karlovy Vary, a city I had always wanted to visit as it's one of the main Czech tourist destinations that I've so far missed. I kept this one and uploaded it mostly because I liked the composition. This is also my first shot posted to Flickr (I think) taken with C41 black and white film, or at least the first taken with Kodak BW400CN.

This shot is one of the few normal-looking shots from my Lomo 135, although even this one has been converted to black and white in Adobe Photoshop 4.0LE.

This is another black and white conversion from my Fujicolor 100 in my Lomo 135. I saw this scene and thought of how it perfectly represented the Communist ugliness of much of Prague's outskirts, although in honesty American capitalists are at least as good at making suburbs look repulsive. Actually, though, Nadrazi Holesovice, Prague's international train station (it's bus and Metro terminal is in the foreground, dedicated, appropriately, in 1984), is one of the best-run in Prague, and maybe the very best. Although, not being Czech, and can't speak for all Czechs, I do know that people come from other parts of Prague just to make reservations and get railcards here because it's less of a nuisance than at the other Prague stations.