Hoover Tower (Realigned)

Excellent contrast, strong composition.

Thanks - I am learning about the power of filters to enhance contrast - the scene speaks for itself compositionally.

Ein grandioser Himmel. Sehr gut!!

Leider kein regen für trockene Kalifornien. . .

Those white clouds make a wonderful contrast and the combination of those long vertical lines with the horizontal one makes a very effective composition. Of course the architecture and the shades of grey are very good.

I cannot help noticing though the perspective distortion. With film photography you can't correct it of course but the digital gives us wonderful possibilities. I'm used to sites where the other photographers don't spare me with a real critique - a thing which I always appreciate - and if I dare post a photo with tilted lines they usually point it pout to me. Often I don't find it necessary to correct the distortion if it's something natural but in this case I think you should have done it (:-) much more so because it's a lovely photo.

Noting the obvious, this is a "digital" photo whether shot on a film or 'digital' camera since it has been scanned from the negative and digitalized for web view. And, the adjustments that I made were in the post scan process with photoshop (yes, film shots can also be toyed with) - clean up, and slight adjustments of levels - and - a slight rotation of the image to "correct" the tower verticality. By not paying attention to the level of the ground/foreground it seems that I have a violation from your keen eye - something I did not account for since my eye's view went directly to the vertical elements of the composition.
Thanks for your observation which has made me look at the image with a new perspective!

As I said I often don't think it necessary to correct a perspective distortion (which is either converging or diverging lines) because it's a perfectly natural phenomenon - think of a road you have in front of you, you will see its sides converging at the horizon. This is widely accepted in the photographic world and no one objects about it. But the same phenomenon happens with vertical lines when you are near a building: many people think one should correct the converging lines of the building, and I don't agree.

But in this case, if you observe carefully, we have the combination of two kinds of "distortion" : the tilting towards the left (which you corrected partially) and the converging lines due to the perspective distortion (look at the tower at right and the one nearly in the center and you can see that they converge with the palm trees at left).

So the solution here is first to correct the tilting using the tool "angle" in the window "lens correction" of Photoshop, until the ground or the roof of the building at center is perfectly horizontal and then correct the vertical lines using the cursor you find just above the angle tool, in this case the one called "vertical perspective". Moving the cursor towards left the converging lines of the palm trees and the towers will become parallel and vertical.