Fargo, North Dakota.

OK, True Confessions Department. This one isn’t a cellphone picture; it’s an experiment with mobile editing on an iPad on a shot I took with my Nikon D500. It started in early May 2024 as we planned for our African journey. Please forgive me for the source image. The file was edited on a mobile device, namely an iPad Air.

The flight to Skukuza from Cape Town was on a much smaller plane than usual, and I wouldn’t be taking my laptop to save weight. For this experiment, I wanted to provide a method for backing up my photos each day and potentially doing some photo editing. In my research, I found a USB and SD connector dock that would attach to my iPad with a USB-C connector. After experimentation, I learned I could transfer files from my camera’s SD cards to an external Solid State Drive and directly to the iPad using the iPad’s Files application. That created two backups, one on the SSD and one on the iPad. I met my first goal of backing up the files on my photo cards for our trip.

I then downloaded and installed Lightroom Mobile for the iPad. The interface is a bit different than I’m used to on my desktop, but I quickly found my way around. I imported the photos on the iPad into Lightroom Mobile and decided to see if I could take a daylight image and do a day-to-night conversion. I picked one of the sample images I copied from my camera card and started editing. Here’s the original.

When the Fargo train depot moved to a different location, a restaurant opened on the former depot site. The restaurant didn’t survive but was replaced by the Great Northern Bicycle Company, which was named in honor of the historic Great Northern Depot. The accidental inclusion of the street lamp gave me the idea for a day-to-night conversion using my iPad. Lightroom Mobile could undoubtedly handle more pedestrian edits if I can do something as complex as one of these conversions.

When I loaded the final image onto my desktop for uploading to WordPress, I noticed some flaws on my larger monitor that I saw on the iPad, so I added a couple of tweaks from Lightroom Classic before it was finished. I considered the project successful when I edited a handful of my safari images and uploaded them to Facebook while we traveled back to the United States. For those interested in using an iPad to back up photo cards, I purchased a HyperDrive 6 Port USB-C Hub for around $70 USD at Best Buy. I also found similar devices on Amazon.

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