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Cellpic Sunday – El Arco

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

The Pacific Ocean crashes against rocky shorelines, provides wonderful beaches, and creates beautiful sunsets for thousands of miles along the western coastlines of the Americas. The photo above features a view of the land’s end at the entrance to the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California. Behind that arch lay thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean.

At the southern tip of the second-longest peninsula in the world is a natural limestone rock formation called simply “The Arch”, or more appropriately in the country of Mexico’s language, “El Arco.” The Baja California peninsula parallels the western coast of Mexico for about 775 miles (1,247 km) and the long, narrow body of water that separates the peninsula from the Mexican coastline is the Sea of Cortez.

In late October, we were on our first cruise since the restart of cruising in 2021. It was our third visit to Cabo San Lucas so we decided our excursion would include a short trip by boat around the southern end of Baja to view El Arco closeup again.

About the photo: Though I took plenty of images with my Nikon D500, I’m always ready to grab my Samsung S20U cellphone to compare the results between the two cameras. Though the D500 has a 16-300mm zoom, the cellphone with a 12000×9000 (108 MP) sensor provides a respectable zoom range by simply cropping in post-production. As it turned out, the boat we were on provided a close enough view of the land’s end that cropping wasn’t necessary. In Adobe Lightroom, I tweaked the composition to level the image on the horizon behind the rock, touched up the contrast, and sent the image to Luminar AI to use the program’s AI module to bring out the detail in the sea and the limestone rock. You can pixel peep at the final image in 2K HD by clicking on the photo to view it on my Flickr site.

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, 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.

John Steiner

39 comments

    • Hey John. I couldn’t respond to your comment on my site. Just wanted to say thanks for stopping by. Have a great week

      Reply

    • We have an issue this year with Grackles that have invaded our neighborhood. Our orange tree didn’t have any oranges on it when we arrived this fall. We wondered why.
      I saw we had a new crop of tiny oranges on the tree in January, but they are now almost all gone. I spotted one grackle sitting on our fence with one of those tiny oranges in its mouth.

      Reply

      • We planted the tree about 10 years ago. It took 3 years before it produced a single orange, then for a few years, it produced over a hundred each season. Two years ago, it started declining, less than 80, then last year, less than 30. This year, nada, and surely next year as well as all of the little orange buds are gone.

      • That’s weird. Our good friends in CA live in an orange grove that is over 100 years old and still producing. It was originally planted by her great uncle who had moved from the LA basin in about 1912. They have about five acres left out of hundreds. They operate the home as an Air BNB. Most of our friends in Woodlake have oranges. It’s a little banana belt encircled by mountains, so just a bit warmer than all the agricultural area surrounding it. However, it seems that Scottsdale/Phoenix would be similar with all the mountains surrounding the valley. It certainly never gets very cold there. So what is causing the lack of buds, I wonder.

      • There were plenty of buds in December when I got here. The grackles appear to like to eat them. There are virtually none left. In previous years, this tree has produced wonderfully juicy and flavorful oranges.

      • That is suck a bummer. I never knew that the birds ate the buds. We had problems with all our fruit trees in CA. I’m sure we had very healthy birds. I just thought I what I can do for your LAPC topic of change. I’ve been thinking about it all week. So much has changed in the last couple of years, but my problem was how to show it. Or I could go an entirely different direction. hmmmm.

  18. Cabo San Lucas is so picturesque, although I prefer the Riviera Maya because it’s the Caribbean. I have to look at your Riviera Maya cruise post. I’ll keep an eye out tomorrow for Cellpic Sunday.

    Reply

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