The rooftops of Copenhagen
by
PaulComment by Bear_Music: I keep coming back to this one. At first I was slightly put off by the blown-out sky area; I spent time obsessing over it, basically saying to myself "Gawd, I wish s/he'd taken the time to FIX that area, this would be perfect!" And that's not all, either; I started obsessing over how much it might be improved with the addition of a slight foreground gradient, because there's a sense of flatness about the scene that seemed a little off to me.
But now it's like the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I see more of the *immediacy* of the image, the very remarkable sense it has of being here-and-now, not heavily manipulated by the photographer's sense of drama. And even that, I suspect, is an illusion, because it HAS to have been manipulated, that's obvious.
So what's the bottom line? Either intentionally, or by happy accident, you are treading a very fine line right on the cusp of the "unreal", the over-dramatic; you know, the country I travel in all the time, where nothing is exactly as it was seen. And you've managed to convince me, at a visceral level, that this one IS "as it was seen", and I love it.
That plus the fact that it's utterly Mary Poppins all over the place. It's a wonderful image, and I'm bumping you 3 points to a 10 just on the basis that your image convinced me to write this rambling essay as I wait for the Patriots to kick off in an American football game.
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