A friend gave me a photo

One of my friends gave me a photo the other day and asked whether it would be of any use for my blog as she knew that I was creating one. I said "Ok I'll see what I can do with it". Lo and behold that night I'm unable to create anything that I'm really happy with at all. Nothing I do seems to make any sense with relevance to the result that I want to produce.
It just didn't work.
I went to bed dissatisfied and rather unhappy that I couldn't do anything with the (admittedly) great angle that the photo had.
About a week later I'm folding through some resources (textures, bumpmaps, fonts etc.) and I come across one that I know I need for something, so I sift through my folder of unfinished projects and random spare stock images, and find the extracted photo of my friend. About 2 hours later I had a project that used the image that I was asked that I was happy with:

Here is the source photo that she gave me to use: