June 16, 2024March 27, 2024 photobyjohnbo

Cellpic Sunday – Exploring Fort Jefferson

Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida.

Fort Jefferson, located in Dry Tortugas National Park of Florida, is a massive former coastal fortress built on a small island, and it is a landmark piece of U.S. history. The Park presents some challenges to visit. Dry Tortugas is located about 70 miles (113 km) from Key West, the westernmost island in the Florida Keys chain. Despite the travel issues, the fort is a popular tourist destination accessible by ferry from Key West, seaplane, or private boat. I will feature a Travel Tuesday post with more details about the journey and the fort. Consider today’s post a teaser.

This behemoth fort is constructed with over 16 million bricks, making it the biggest brick structure in North and South America. Only a few other US forts, like Fort Monroe in Virginia, surpass its size. It was a significant challenge to bring building materials to the island, so it’s understandable why Fort Jefferson was never fully finished or armed despite nearly 30 years (1846-1875) of construction. I will save the rest of the history lesson for the upcoming Travel Tuesday post.

The fort’s construction involved many supporting brick walls, and accessibility from one section to the next required many openings, each supporting the roof structure above with a brick archway. Some of the archways were only wide enough for a person to use, while others allowed men and equipment easy access throughout the fort. I was presented with many opportunities to capture images featuring repeating arches.

In addition to the doorway arches, there are outlines of arches on the floor. They are the remnants of tracks used by wheels at the back end of cannons that were pointed toward the seaside gun ports. The gun ports are not visible due to the short wall arch supports on the right.

About the photo: Looking north from the east side of the hexagonal fort, the interior fort walls were mainly open and offered minimal obstruction, allowing sunlight to flood the interior along nearly the entire wall. Using my Samsung S23U, I captured the image of receding arches. After cataloging and cropping within Lightroom Classic, I exported the image to Luminar Neo. From there, I did very little processing. I lowered the highlights in the Develop module. Then, I used Enhance AI to increase the contrast and add additional light to the darker foreground due to the wall on the left in this section. You are welcome to pixel-peep at the image in 2K HD on my Flickr site by clicking on the image.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s also acceptable. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner