I give this four stars, Jen. It is utterly surreal now that it is cropped. Your own interpretation of it as the presence of nature within the city is fine, but it does not go far enough for this picture. I see this image as comparing reality to fantasy. The grid of the building is hard and real. So are the tiny people and the little trees that are dwarfed by this building. Yet the building is no longer a building. Jen has changed it into a dream by capturing those reflected clouds within it. The clouds on the blue sky are not real clouds because they are part of the building. They are dream clouds, the stuff of fantasy. That is why I call this image surreal. It goes far beyond reality and integrates our wishes (dreaming upon a cloud) with the facts (life is hard, rigid, boxed in, as that building is). it is a contradictory image, Jen -- is it real or imagined? I love it. The more I look at it, the more I dream. By stripping away all of its context with that crop, you make the image more abstract and emphasize the incongruous juxtaposition of cloud and building more effectively. As for human values, the image is full of hope, wishes, and wonders. All of which humans spend a lot of time thinking about.
