Alcatraz light house

A frog's or tourist's view perspective

Decaying shack

Along the Agave Trail on the south side of Alcatraz, this shack shows up. The view is gorgeous, and this peeling decaying piece of pragmatic architecture just drew my eye in.

Alcatraz Agave

The south end of Alcatraz is being reclaimed by nature nowadays. As part of this reclamation process, the hilly slopes end up being thorny forests of proud agave.

Alcatraz water reservoir and cell house

As a Christmas gift to any reader celebrating on Christmas day rather than eve, here is a piece of nice and illustrative HDR.

This was a clean example of where HDR is good to use. The shrubs in shadow, the reservoir in sunlight, a bright sunny day. I shot one, and saw immediately on the preview that the sky as well as the shade both were blown out. Reset for HDR, shoot three in a row, and then merge at home.

And once Photoshop loads up the HDR dialogue, it was immediately obvious that hardly anything more had to be done to the picture: the automatic HDR settings were pretty much what I wanted out of it — a naturalistic look, but balanced the dark and light tones.