I don’t love this photo, but I don’t hate it either.  Let’s say I’m disappointed with it.  I think the problem is that I tried to get too much into the photo, and properly captured none of it.  The telephone has outstanding detail; the bush has a string of Christmas lights, remnants of when there was more hope associated with this diner, and the diner wall and window has the great decayed look and the reflection of the sign.  all of those elements are in the photo.  Look close and you can see the detail in the telephone, and you can see the Christmas lights.  They’re just so small they are almost lost.

I’m not sure there was a perfect way t compose this scene.  Because of the orientation of the elements, it would not be possible to get real close on the telephone without losing the visual connection to the diner.  Maybe that would have been the way to go, anyway.  This photo also caused trouble in that Photomatix could not handle it at all for reasons I cannot fathom.  No matter what settings I used, that program generated an output that was extremely noisy.  I had to switch to Bracketeer to get the job done.  So I guess my optimistic takeaway is that I did salvage something usable from a problematic set of brackets.