Pine Knoll Shores, North Carolina.

For two weeks in January, we rented a condo on Emerald Isle, off the coast of North Carolina. Compared to our stay in Saint Augustine Florida in 2023, Emerald Isle is a quiet place to visit in January. There isn’t nearly as much traffic and many of the condos in the complex are empty this time of year. January in North Carolina can be quite chilly, our first-week highs were mostly in the 40s or 50s. The lack of traffic is all the better for us and, despite it being the off-season, there are plenty of places to visit. One such place is the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores. Located on the northern end of the island, it’s a 20-minute drive from our rental on the southern end. In an upcoming Travel Tuesday post, I will feature a story about our visit to the aquarium.

One of the more fascinating exhibits is designed for children of all ages, myself included. Lynn and I watched as those much younger than us were allowed to reach into the water to touch and even pick up some of the creatures in a shallow pool. One girl was having so much fun exploring the pool, that she didn’t want to leave. Every time her mom took her hand out of the water and dried it off, the girl immediately dunked it back into the water. Eventually, the child gave in and they were off to the next exhibit.

A docent kept a watchful eye on the children to ensure that the critters in the pool weren’t harmed or even taken out of the water. The only creature they weren’t allowed to pick up was the sand crab. I must say that I learned a lot about the hermit crab that day. I’d never seen one inhabiting a shell before. I even watched one that turned itself upside down and then rotated itself upright again. Hermit crabs don’t grow their own shells. They scavenge for abandoned shells left by other snails or hermit crabs as they grow. It would have been fascinating to witness a shell “upgrade.”

About the photo: The water in the pool is less than six inches deep so there is no shortage of light to capture photos of the critters that live there. I put my Samsung S23U camera into Pro mode and captured a raw DNG image of one of the hermit crabs. Getting the images off my cellphone, though, was a bit of a challenge. I usually connect my phone to my laptop via a dual USB-C cable, navigate the computer to the DCIM folder on the phone, and then select and copy the images. Every time I opened the folder, the computer would start displaying thumbnails of the photos in the folder only to crash and close the window before it finished opening the folder.

After several attempts, I restarted my laptop, and the problem was solved. I imported the files into Adobe Lightroom Classic and went to work on processing images. For this image, I cropped it square and sent it off to Luminar Neo for final tweaks in Enhance AI and Structure AI. To help sharpen the image since it was blurred a bit by the diffraction effect of the water, I used the Supersharp module in Neo. A couple of minor exposure and contrast tweaks later and it was ready to share. To view the image in 2K HD via my Flickr site, click on it.

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 acceptable as well. 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, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner