“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
Visual impressions are inherently subjective, so it is a fundamental challenge to prescribe a recipe for an “impressive” photograph, either in terms of the subject or the technique. The are some guidelines, though, that can increase the chances of a particular image being noticed or stirring emotions in people. Typically, these guidelines are rooted in human phychology, more specifically, in phychologycal traits that have developed through years of evolution.
One such trait is that rare events have more emotional impact than common ones. For example, sunsets are more spectacular than solar eclipses, but the latter ones are more memorable, because they are far less common.
Photographers are in a unique position to make even commonplace events memorable. One way to make everyday events more impressive is to highlight their exceptional surroundings or circumstances. For example, I don’t notice the splendor of most everyday sunsets in my home town, but I remember every detail of the one my wife and I watched from Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence during our first trip there.
“, so similar loss of details occurs when we think about events that are separated from the present moment by a stretch of time (either recalling the past or imagining the future.) Our minds fill in the lost details by spreading the remaining information over time, essentially performing an interpolation similar to what a Healing Brish tool in Photoshop does with pixels in photographs during retouching. As a result, the recalled or imagined events appear smoother, softer, less irritating than the actual experience. In this sense, time really does heal.
lens on a 
body, which gave me ability to zoom in on details of particularly striking exhibits and to capture candid shots of other visitors. In Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, I used my iPhone to take photos of tourists enjoying some of the most striking works.
Of course, asking a stranger to take a photo has disadvantages. For one, there is a psychological barrier of striking a conversation. Perhaps, more importantly, there is no control of how the person would compose a shot. In my experience, the chance of getting a reasonably good photo by asking a random tourist to take it is less than 50%. More often than not, my face would end up dead centre in the frame and/or out-of-focus.
The location of the castle in the middle of a modern metropolis is in sharp contrast to the deep moats, surrounding its high walls, the original purpose of which was clear – warfare. A man was throwing frisbee to his dog in the grass-covered moat, and I could not make up my mind what was more out-of-place – this peaceful scene or the stone cannonballs piled up in the moats. I think it’s the former; the calm of a modern city life and seemed like a superficial patina on the tough nature of the place.
Amazing thing about Gothic cathedrals is that they take enormous amounts of time to construct and require restoration immediately after being built. The amount of detail in their 
Personally, I prefer when some travel plans are set in advance (the planning process itself is an important and exciting part of the trip), but some details are left to be finalized on the spot (this certainly applies to the menu choices of each meal). The balance between giving only few prescribed options and allowing some freedom to customize the experience is tricky. In a sense, it is like selecting a watch face of an apple watch: you have many options to play with, but not enough to paralyze you with indecision. 
What distinguishes the gothic cathedral for me is that it looks like its elements are flying upward, as if in an explosion of vertical lines and tiny details. I tried to show this by using a wide lens (
, which distorts the image in favour of keeping the straight lines straight).
