The Blessed Sun

@john4jack: I adore the D300... have to stop myself from gushing when I stumble on another D300 user's blog, just in case they are more blasé about the camera than I can manage to be ;-)

I also discovered recently what a sturdy beast it is - out for a walk on a very icy path along a river I went down in a very hard fall. my intention to cushion the camera with my body didn't work out, but it's just as well - it put a massive set of cracks in the ice and continued to take pictures as if nothing had happened. not an experiment I'd recommend repeating, but I was relieved that it and the lens had 'bounced'.

@manel: yes - the horizon is well off the horizontal: hard to see when shooting into the sun, so I used the buildings as guidance. I decided to keep it that way because I liked the way the shoreline road curved up while the horizon curved down, and to my eye the curvature gives a sense of being at the top of the world or edge of the earth: the world is turning and things fall away.

pragmatically speaking, although I didn't try it, if I'd rotated and cropped the image it might have ruined the composition. the line of fence posts would have been cut off and the upmost cloud truncated, and the shot wouldn't have had the same rhythm.

@Richard_Irwin: thanks Richard.

@Aaron W. Strasburg: thanks Aaron