A view from Södermalm

Flare — bright sky. Maybe I overdid the saturation boost a bit. (Oh, what the heck. :)
This shot was saved from total oblivion by the excellent Photoshop plug-in Curvemeister.

There's the church of the knights again, with the black spire — and the Stockholm
city hall to its left. The "original" size of this picture is somewhat larger than the other
"originals" in this series, to show some of the detail captured in the picture.

For instance: you can see the three gold crowns at the tip of the city hall's spire. We learned
during the city hall tour that people in Sweden are not certain what the crowns, a symbol for
Stockholm itself, represent. Are they religious symbols? Political? The debate continues.

The original of this shot — a pretty good-sized TIFF file — kind of amazed me. At first
it looked soft due to the flare effect from the bright sky. But after sharpening it within
Photoshop, I began seeing the most amazing amount of detail in the picture. For instance, there
are some columns at the top of the city hall building. In the TIFF file, you can actually count
the flutings in the columns. You can almost see expressions of people whose faces are all but
invisible in this saved-for-the-web version of the photo. Yikes! Imagine, ten years from now,
how much fine detail "consumer" digital cameras will be able to capture! (Of course, we'll all
have to buy 10 terabyte hard drives.)

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© 2006 Mike Arst