I used a 245mm telephoto converter lens to reach out and compress a slice of Lisbon’s Baixa neighborhood from the top of the Elevador de Santa Justa, an iron elevator tower built around 100 years ago by one of A.G. Eiffel’s apprentices. The buildings running across the middle of the picture display laundry, umbrellas, satellite TV dishes, and windows of every description, and are typical of the 18th and 19th century architecture that gives the city its great charm. The more I study this image, the more I realize how critical my vantage point was. In order to reach across those rooftops, I had to be high – very high. I was not shooting down from the elevator tower, as much as I was shooting away from it. My height allowed me to juxtapose the mass of red rooftops in the foreground and that solid wall of wonderfully mismatched 19th century homes on the side of a hill beyond them. It was my camera position that made such juxtaposition possible.