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[Dan]

Enjoyed the show very very much.

I especially enjoyed the impromptu attack on a first view of a photo..
The procedure thought process makes for much more proficiency.
Several things inspired me to draw on it..

One of which the shadowing "vignette" guiding the eyes to the tunnel and cropping a bit
more aggressively, toning down the distracting lighted signs and, Oh yes!,  lighting the lamps.

I was having some difficulty doing selective color area enhancement trying to get the right feel of how bright those signs should be in order to balance out and was hoping a slider could just control it for a quicker look and feel test.
And on cropping.. I just widen my whole frame of my gimp window and slide around the whole picture with a move command, checking each side as it falls out of the window. 

Thanks Rolf 
Very much
Dan

[owen_cook]

Thanks, always new tricks to learn. I will experiment with the perspective tool as that seemed to be part of the distortion

All the best

[fishtoprecords]

Rolf, I thought you were in what used to be Western Germany. That plaza is so ugly, it has to be from a poor town in the eastern side. What were they thinking when the "designed" it? Was this an example of architecture not to replicate?

Just looking at it makes me feel cold and wet.

[Rolf]

Bremen is a strange city.

It's part of the state Bremen, the smallest in the federal republic, which consists out of two cities, Bremen and Bremerhaven, 65km apart on the river Weser. 550.000 people in Bremen, 100.000 in Bremerhaven. Highest public debt per capita of the states, basically bankrupt for decades. investments into public services are low, don't ask me about funding for schools. Ah, the last place we have in the PISA educational studies has nothing to do with lack of funding and higher work load for teachers.....

Bremen was a rich city for centuries, member of the Hanse in medieval times and an important port and shipyard city later on. If you are in the US and your family came in the 19th century from Germany, Austria or anything more eastern up to Siberia, there is a big chance they went through Bremen and Bremerhaven. If you drank a cup of coffee in northern Europe up to 1970, it went through Bremen and a big part of it was also processed here. Same with tobacco. Hamburg did the tea. ;-)

Then several things hit at the same moment.  A lot of subventions were paid to boost West-Berlin's economy. And suddenly it was cheaper to unload a ship in Bremen, drive the coffee or tobacco to Berlin, process it there and drive it back to Bremen for distribution than to roast and pack it here. Factories left to rot, people laid off.
The South Koreans found out, that it is not actually rocket science to build a ship and that Korean workers do more for less money. Shipyards closed, people laid off.
Someone invented these metal boxes and people in Rotterdam and Hamburg thought: "Containers will be the future!". Bremerhaven has a big container port now too, but late.
People with a good income wanted to live in their own house. Land was available in the surrounding hamlets which grew to small cities. And then the tax code changed and your income tax was due where you lived and not where you worked. 

Just before these '70 the Bremen mayors had big plans with giant streets, a sky line and so on. Then (1965) this building was erected for Siemens.

And 1999 Siemens sold the building to the City, which sold it to an investor and rented it back for decades. And now it is really rotting away.

On the other side Bremen has the highest number of millionaires per capita in Germany. As I said, a strange city.

[monoceros84]

Rolf, I thought you were in what used to be Western Germany. That plaza is so ugly, it has to be from a poor town in the eastern side.

That's neither nice nor truthful. Of cause you will find ugly places in Eastern Germany but you will find at least as much in the Western parts. Just because the Eastern states were renovated a few years ago after the reunion and the Western states were not.
Don't know were you come from but you have either never seen Eastern Germany or it was 25 years ago. Or you had very bad luck in choosing your travelling target.

[fishtoprecords]

That's neither nice nor truthful.

Oh, sorry for my tone, I was joking. I've actually only been in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. I was applying the usual prejudice on the soviet style.

But that particular plaza that Rolf shot is spectacularly cold and ugly.

I think the 1960s were a worldwide era of some really ugly buildings. A large number were build in the Washington DC area where I live, in the name of "urban redevelopment" which was really a plan to bulldoze slums where poor people lived and replace them with modern buildings for middle class. That whole plan failed in cities all over the US. In 20 years, you had new slums, many of which looked a lot like the plaza in Bremen.

[Rolf]

Well, in the 60s we tried to emulate the USA - so we got this marvel of architecture. Was praised a lot then.....

Eastern Germany was developed massively in the last 20 years and has now an infrastructure that is partly better than in the western parts. Especially in the economically weak areas like ours. A sensible topic.... ;-)

[Fornit]

Eastern G looks really often better than the west. If you want really great architecture, look at Dresden. There you got fascinating old and fascinating new buildings.
Even the old Plattenbauten (don't know the English name for it, I mean that buldings for creating fast and cheap livingroom) look not so bad, if they are renovated.

But I like this place in Bremen. It has it's own charme and you have a shop nearby. What else do you want?

[fishtoprecords]

What else do you want?

Good and inexpensive beer.

[Rolf]

Depends on taste - but we have good beer here in Bremen. But we had this in already in a different thread.

[monoceros84]

@ Fornit: It's indeed "plattenbau" in English too. Seems to be a German invention 

Yeah, Dresden is really a good recommendation if you want to see impressive architecture. Of cause you will still find some abandoned areas - just visit Chemnitz  But sometimes this can be great for a photographer, as Fornit said.