I often seek the essence of a building by shooting something else, using the building itself as context rather than subject matter. I do this here to comment on how China’s emperors protected themselves within a walled city for nearly 500 years. They built a 30-foot high wall around their palace complex, and then surrounded it with a 160-foot wide moat. The moat is my subject, not the Forbidden City. Instead of just shooting the moat from anywhere, I walked to a corner, and created a frame within my camera’s frame out of the walls of the moat as they came together. My 24mm wideangle converter lens exaggerates thrust of these walls, making the moat look even wider than it really is. The wideangle perspective reduces the size of the tower at the corner of the walled city, emphasizing the width of the moat and the thickness of its walls. The foggy weather creates an ethereal atmosphere, a perfect context for the shimmering reflection of the Forbidden City adrift in the waters of the moat.