This image is from a courtyard that I pass almost every day on my way to work. We call this a “Durchhaus” in Austria, meaning a house between two streets, with one or more courtyards connected by a thoroughfare, basically a shortcut between the streets, going right through the house.
This particular one is between Neustiftgasse and Lerchenfelderstraße. It was revitalized recently and now has two restaurants, a bicycle shop, a bakery and a gallery café. In a way it always reminds me of Italy. I shall really post some more images.
Now, as I passed through this morning, I suddenly saw this incredibly red flower high above me, hanging from a balcony, and I knew I had to take a picture. I tried two rather conventional shots, and then decided for a diagonal approach.
After the fact I used the good old glamor blur, basically the same as on the hearts in the trees, only much more decent. You do that by duplicating the background layer, setting the mode to “Screen” and giving the layer a good “Gaussian Blur” with a radius of, say, 50. Then you copy the original layer one more time, set its mode to one of the darkening modes, in this case “Linear Burn”, more frequently “Overlay”. You blur that as well, only much less, say 10 pixels. Finally you sharpen the background layer and adjust the opacities of the two effect layers. It is amazing how well the effect works on images with dull colors.