stretch out the sun

First of all, before I get into anything technical, I want to tell you what instantly struck me about this photo, and what makes it absolutely gorgeous in my eyes. It's a photo of a place with absolutely no humans or other living things involved (unless you count the trees outside the window). It's actually a pretty sparse scene in terms of stuff-in-the-picture (not at all a bad thing).

But...it made me FEEL. The second I saw this, I wanted to be in that place, curled up on that couch. You took a picture of a fraction of a room and captured a sense of warmth, welcoming and comfort. It makes me think of the kind of picture you'd see in a brochure for a really lovely hotel. If this is in your house, I'm going to explode with envy.

Ok, so technical stuff. The colours and patterns are satisfyingly intentional and coordinated, which has more to do with the decor of the room than the photo, but you've capture just ENOUGH of the room to show off all that good stuff in a really effective way.

It's tough in a scene where there are lots of lines and curves to know what to keep perfectly horizontal or vertical to stop it looking tilted. I saved the picture just to try something (I've deleted it now, promise!) and if you rotate it slightly so that the horizontal lines in the windows are parallel to the top and bottom of the frame, it looks noticably more 'upright'. It does result in the vertical edges of the window being slightly slanted, but that didn't look too 'off'.

I can't see your EXIF data, but it looks like this was taken with a wide(ish) angle lens (or just zoomed right out), which can distort lines at the edges of the image. If you're working with a camera where you have optical zoom (where it actually zooms in with the lens, rather than just zooming in on the image digitally), standing back and zooming in will give you straighter lines.