Note: I have no clue what I am talking about on any kind of technical level. This is purely the opinion and advice or a rank amateur. All photos were taken with a cheap Kodak camera and cropped using Picasa, Google's free image editing and organizing program.

As I said, most every tourist who visits the Lincoln Memorial takes a shot like this. Like the picture used in the first part of this article, it's not a terribly bad picture, except for the slight list of the horizon, it's just kinda boring. Let's start by making the image tall rather than wide and ridding ourselves of the extraneous image on the sides. And maybe straightening the darn thing up a bit.

One of the great things about taking this picture is that the narrowing perspective effect of the reflecting pool creates a natural pointer to the Washington Monument, which means that the eye is naturally led to the monument regardless of it's position in the image. Now, I shall try to go the other direction and instead of removing the extraneous image on the sides, I will now remove the extraneous stairs and people at the bottom of the image.

And for good measure, we can go even farther and create a pseudo-panorama.

I hope anyone who has read this and is a crappy photographer like me has been inspired to mess around with their images some and see what they can do with them. And I hope any good photographers have not laughed too much.