Buckeye, Arizona.

I write Cellpic Sunday posts a few weeks in advance. For example, I am writing this on March 7, 2022, almost a month before the scheduled publication date. By the time you read this, our winter home in Buckeye will be a recent memory. We are currently in the process of selling, have a buyer, and scheduled closing date of 28 March. I know we will miss the spectacular sunsets we’ve seen in the decade since wintering in Arizona.

About the photo: We enjoy our evening walks in Buckeye, especially when the skies are on fire like they were on this February evening in 2015. Yuma Avenue is the main east-west highway that is just a block north of the house. On this night, we were walking toward the local grocery store, only about two blocks away. After snapping the image, I’d planned to share it as a Cellpic Sunday at some point, but when I saw the original image, I realized that there were too many power lines in the photo. I passed over it.

While looking back through my gallery this weekend for possible Lens-Artists photos, I came across the Yuma Avenue Sunset image again. This time, however, I have Luminar Neo in my toolkit. Maybe I could salvage the image after all. I made basic edits in Lightroom, then sent it off to Neo to see how much the power line removal tool would accomplish.

After completing the powerline removal, Neo left some partial power poles and some very faint power lines on the far right edge of the image. Rather than use the erase tool to try to remove those pieces manually, I decided that changing the crop would be much easier. Changing the crop also gave me the opportunity to focus more on that beautiful fiery sky.

This image was captured with my Samsung S5 cell phone. I raised the exposure in the shadows some, but the small sensor in the S5 really generated noise in the shadows when I raised the exposure level too high. I raised it just enough to bring out the sidewalk but left that empty desert lot to the left in the shadows. A photo taken from the same spot today would feature a new car wash and several newer buildings in front of the Walgreens store that is in the center of the photo.

To view these images in 2K HD, you can see them in my Flickr album here, or click on the opening image. I have found that there is no link function available in the Compare tool.

I am including this post in Hammad Rais’ Weekend Sky photo series. As I noted above, this post is being written in early March, so the link to the Weekend Sky series is from March 5.

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.

John Steiner