Explored December 17, 2020
Before autumn finally gives way to winter, here's another image from a photowalk with Flickr friends back in November 2018. This a a view westwards from the rooftop terrace of the Reichstag building. While the Reichstag building's rooftop terrace is by no means the highest viewpoint in Berlin, you still have a pretty good view over the city in all four directions. And on that particular(ly cold) day we enjoyed a lovely golden hour up there that ended in a really spectacular sunset later.
Some of the builings you can see here are amongst Berlin's landmarks: there's the Victory Column with the gilded statue of Victoria on top – which was featured in the video for U2's song "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" from their 1993 album Zooropa, and also in Wim Wender's movie Wings of Desire (1987). The tower on the right behind the Victory column which looks like the Eiffel tower's little brother is the Berlin Radio Tower which was inaugurated in 1926. On the left behind the Victory Column you can see the Teufelsberg ("Devil's mountain"), a rubble mountain which also covers the unfinished Nazi military-technical college (Wehrtechnische Fakultät); on top of the Teufelsberg you can see the remains of a former US listening station (the buildings with those spherical roofs). And the tower at the far right is the Tiergarten Carillon, the closest building to the Reichtags building in that direction. The 42 meter high Carillon is a large, manually played "Glockenspiel" consisting of 68 bells; it's located in Berlin's largest park, the Tiergarten (all those colourful tree tops you can see).
At first I thought I'd crop the image to get rid of the decorative roof element which you can see on the left. But then I thought that it's actually another layer in this multi-layered city image and also a nice anchor or entry point. Regarding the sky I should admit that I needed "a little help from my friends" aka photo editing software (Luminar AI to be precise): While the colours which you see are pretty much true to the golden hour colours we'd had on that afternoon – a warm, golden glow on the horizon that started to rise into the bright blue November sky – there was a fairly large area blown-out from the low afternoon sun which, for me, would have ruined the image. Other than that I've edited the image in Color Efex Pro starting from the preset "Warm Sunset".
Happy Hump Day, dear Flickr friends, wash hands, wear a mask, and stay safe and healthy!
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