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Cellpic Sunday – The Gorilla at Taino Bay

Taino Bay’s mysterious gorilla.

Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.

I can’t say much about this giant gorilla, as Internet searches came up either empty or with references to other gorilla sculptures. An attraction at the Taino Bay port area, the gorilla appears to be a bandstand or platform for performances of some kind. As you can see from the photo, the structure is quite close to the cruise ship dock that was enlarged from the cargo ship pier in 2021 to add additional cruise ship moorings to the city.

Nearby, about a 15-minute drive from Taino Bay, the Amber Cove Cruise Port began welcoming cruisers in 2015. Amber Cove is a Carnival property and we were scheduled to visit there via the Carnival Magic in 2018, but bad weather in the area caused Carnival to drop the port stop that week. We would not stop in Puerto Plata until January 2023 via the Norwegian Escape.

About the photo: I captured it on my Samsung S20U. The gorilla sculpture and the Norwegian Escape made a nice composition featuring a popular photo stop at Taino Bay. I had to wait a bit while other cruisers took selfies while standing next to the gorilla.

I cataloged the image in Adobe Lightroom Classic and used the program’s cropping and alignment tools to level the horizon and remove extraneous stuff at the image’s edges. I exported the file to Luminar Neo for development tweaks, mainly the Smart Contrast tool and Enhance AI to adjust the exposure. The jpeg file didn’t need any more than that, so I uploaded it to my Flickr site in 2K HD and posted it here as a 1K image. Click on the photo above to view the high-resolution version or check out its metadata.

Lynn and I are traveling this week for a family reunion. I may be a bit scarce in responding to your comments immediately and in checking out your Cellpic Sunday responses.

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

John Steiner

48 comments

      • Thank you to present this fabulous “Gorilla”.

        For answer to your beautiful picture:

        a band of art work made of wood and metal has been standing since 2007, in Nantes ( West France) old shipyards,.

        Sorry but now I am able to send you back just an official article because my WordPress blog is no more working (hacked last year).

  22. I’ve heard of the elephant in the room, but that is definitely the gorilla on the boat! What a scare it would be to come up at night on that face! 🙂

    Reply

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