Horizontal or Vertical?

The images you see here on Joe Blog are hosted on the photo sharing community website called Flickr. This is a great site where you can show photos, engage in communities to meet like minded photographers and learn about photography. I post images on Flickr regularly and it's always interesting to see the number of times a photo is viewed and the comments that an image solicits.

For example, two weeks ago I posted an image called Frozen Sunset.



Two days ago, I posted another image from the same shoot. This time a photo with a vertical orientation called South Tamworth Sunset.

What is fascinating is that as of this writing, South Tamworth Sunset has over twice the number of views and more nice comments by other Flickr users including several "favorite" designations. Why is that? These two pictures are essentially the same... but different. Is is the vertical orientation of the second image? I have some thoughts, but what do you like best and why? Let me know.