Did you ever wake up in the morning and feel that your life is ordinary? That your life is devoid of excitement, challenges, and purpose. I sure have felt that way … not once, not twice, but many times until one day I looked up and things started to change.
Looking up helped me believe there is no ceiling and that the possibilities are endless. So why limit yourself? Get out there and look up more often. The more you look up the more courage you’ll have to soar, do extraordinary things, and live an extraordinary life. And yes, you may be alone up there but the view sure will be extraordinary.
Nice thought. A minor observation on the ‘up’ shot: the sky looks a bit painted, probably because of the halo around the buildings. Is that an HDR?
Thanks, Santanu. No, this is not an HDR in the true sense of the term (but I wish it was). I took this photo on a summer afternoon in New York with the sun blazing. Not an ideal condition for taking a single exposure photo. However, since I wasn’t carrying a tripod (which is absolutely necessary for avoiding horizontal and vertical shifts for multiple exposures) I decided to take a single exposure by metering on the buildings and slightly underexposing so that the sky is not blown out completely and recover the shadow details later in post-processing. To my surprise the camera had excellent dynamic range and the photo was totally usable as is. I still did a bit of post processing in Aperture to fix the highlights (very bright sky) and increased the contrast by using a Photoshop plugin preset to give the HDR effect. The halo around the buildings usually happens for high contrast situations and becomes more pronounced when you increase the contrast. I could have fixed it by reducing the luminosity but thought it looked kinda cool and accentuated the “eagle” shaped sky. Do you see it? 🙂