Beautiful photos (this as well as those on your site). Incidentally I'm spending the better part of this quarter in Hungary, though fortunately well away from the country side and the nasty weather that seems to have hit the more rural parts of the country. Glad to see it inspired some beautiful pictures at least!

Thanks :) - This nasty weather as I heard also struck Budapest too, I just happened to evade it (I work there - there are no much decent jobs anywhere else in this country). Deep in the city usually these crisis situations are not that visible, but on Saturday I red that even the outgoing sections (within Budapest) of motorways M1 & M7 were closed. Somehow I never much get to realize why these situations are so tragic. A few years ago living in Miskolc I even picked a nasty day with severe snowstorms to visit the mountains. It took one and a half hour (yes, I was waiting in the station until then! - of course one of us lunatics called them on phone if something will eventually come) to dig out the narrow gauge stock for that day's service, and then we also had some out-of-schedule stops to remove branches from the track. That's fine then (this time as I heard this narrow gauge railway operated completely normal despite the situation), it was a nasty winter day. But even when freezing cold, I can like those, to walk out in that kind of weather! With proper preparations it is nothing that terrible, truly it can be magnificent - it's just that we have to know and be aware of the strength of Nature.

I would have made a colour key out of that

Huh, thanks for the visit & fave :3 - I just don't understand what do you mean here with that colour key? The adjustments are nothing much special by the way, I desaturated the environment a bit so it got more black & white, and pushed light & saturation a bit up on the train so it got to stand out. It needed some manual job after this since the edge of the selection can just never be fully exact (so around the outer edges of the train at this picture's original size I used a small soft brush with colour picker to paint these jaggies out). These didn't take any more than about a quarter hour in total. Well, if that was what you were interested in! :)

should I edit it for you?.....

I mean something like this:

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3470/.....759fcd5f_b.jpg

Yep, now I see, so this is how they call this :). Well, my original intention was this with it, at first I just desaturated the environment to black & white to see what happens. But I didn't see it fit to what impression I wanted to make with the picture. Putting it in a black & white environment truly brings it out, but it also kind of displaces the subject, like in a different plane of existence. I would see it fit if the subject to bring out somehow is naturally off the flow, is somewhat "rebellious" (in the past I had a nice example for this in my faves, an orange-red vagabond parked between some white run-of-the-mill cars which was enhanced this way, but the author deleted this picture), but here I didn't want this effect. That little engine belongs there, I just wanted to focus it, but not completely lift it off from it's environment. So I finally settled with this level of saturation, it seemed to work best with my intentions.

A bit long, but hope you see. You may try: I think the meaning of the image will somewhat change (or I feel like you may too see the change I see comparing the two) if you completely remove colour from the environment. Well anyway, it's interesting to experience with this stuff, nice you pointed it out! :3

well I've just tried and personally I don't think it looks too bad......

Neither did I say it would look "bad", just not the kind of expression I wanted this image to show ;) - so just say, different, at least I felt it so, so this time I decided to rather go with just this approach.

I have a bit similar picture, by which I mean I similarly adjusted it a bit this one. This is desaturated (completely, nothing cut etc.) compared to how the camera took it. I went for it to emphasise on the decay, dust, while not wanting to completely turn it into like an old black & white image. Here with this little red engine the case is rather that: to somewhat emphasise on the snow, the greyscale-ish nature of winter while not removing the colour altogether.

An other approach which would probably work well on this might be going for completely desaturating the background, but then shifting it (very!) slightly towards red/yellow, somehow to make it resemble to that of the colouring some old photograph. It would give it again a different meaning, the train harmonizing with the background in colour, but still, something different. I checked that too, it also seems to work: desaturate the bg., then remove 20% from blue, 10% from green, this is about right for the intended mood - and this is again something very different! :)

Nice photos there.

They're all good, but, I like the angle on this one here, it makes the Bzmot look even more interesting than it already is. :)
Those colors contrast rather nicely with the ice and snow.