I was out for my run this morning and started to think about why we value the things that we do. Why a hard-earned run PR feels so good. Why a home cooked meal tastes so much better. Why we tend to love the old Dreamlights more than the current projections. One might not be objectively better than another. A meal you order in might still taste awesome. The projections are still stunning.
But at the end of the day, I just think it all comes down to the fact that we appreciate effort. Were the Dreamlights a pain in the butt to put up? I have no doubt. Was that crane in the background of all of your castle pictures kind of annoying? Sure. But at the end of all of it, after all of the work and disruption that went into putting them up, we got this view. And I think we didn't just love it because it was beautiful. I think we loved it because an enormous amount of time and energy went into creating it each year.
I took this years ago but I never knew exactly how I wanted to present it here. In the end, I stayed true to what I saw with my naked eye ... but then transformed the whole thing into an oil painting. The gloss of memory. With a nameless little green fairy added in for good measure because, for me, she's an integral part of any castle evening.
Settings for the photograph itself were straightforward—35mm, f/4.0, 1/100 second, ISO 100.