I like it how the crop and the switch to black and white change the mood entirely. The result has an eerie feeling of abandonment, loneliness and even desperation (at least in my perception) while the original shot actually feels crowded and much more ordinary.
As far as your sharp left turn in the post goes, I am personally not a fan of self-upvoting as far as it is about comments on other people posts. Upvoting your own post when posting feels like a regular part of the platform and the culture and that seems to be by design (you have the self-upvote checkbox checked by default). Giving you post the initial boost that your Steem Power allows is fair in my book even in regard to whales. But squeezing all your votes and keeping them for your own comments instead of spreading the love to other people's posts that you find deserving is too self-serving and completely defeats the purpose of the platform.
I personally find the new voting power degradation curve quite frustrating as I don't have enough Steem to adjust the slider to 25%, but I really feel like giving out more than 10 upvotes per day. I might actually have to switch to eSteem for upvoting purposes since it allows control for that regardless of the amount of Steem Power one holds. I personally think it's unreasonable to withhold the feature from smaller accounts on Steemit after the changes that were done in HF19.
That is a good point with the slider, I don't know why it is withheld.
Upvoting own posts I understand as lioke you said but giving 50 dollars to 'Cool!' I am not a fan of. It is just greed.
My guess would be that when this feature was designed or when the limit was introduced, accounts that had under 500SP would have too small of an upvote anyway, so making their votes even smaller might have been viewed as pointless and just allowing them to cast just too many virtually meaningless votes. The thing is now when the maximum voting power went up, people that don't have access to the slider can't really revert to the old setting and are forced to either be stingy with their votes (which I hate) or to allow their voting power to drop to really low levels. I personally experienced that last week while I was not watching my votes, so my ability to upvote with even of small value had pretty much disappeared because I consistently overshot the 10 upvotes per day mark. So I was stuck casting low value votes anyway without the ability to regulate that properly and spread my SP a bit more evenly without being stingy with it.
And on you other point, a one word comment with a 50 dollar reward is bound to look fishy and uncool regardless of the way the value got there - selfvote or not.
I know the issue as some of my family are here awaiting a slider and they are in the same boat that would like to vote more but feel they can't. Perhaps it will be cleared up in the future.
Yes, there are very few reasons for a comment to get that kind of support.