Cellpic Sunday – The Lady Helen

The Lady Helen.

Saint Augustine Florida.

Our first visit to Saint Augustine, Florida, allowed me to enjoy many new venues for exciting photos. This year we are spending almost the entire month of January in a rented condo, so the image above features a view of the Saint Augustine Fish Camp Restaurant and the boat Lady Helen docked in the San Sebastian River right next to the restaurant.

My sister from Albuquerque came for a visit and during her stay, she connected with a couple of friends of hers from New Mexico that have since moved to Saint Augustine. They recommended a meeting at the restaurant and made a reservation. My sister’s friends knew that a reservation would be required, and they were right. The place was busy on a Saturday at noon. We learned why. Their seafood is spectacular. I enjoyed my first taste of gator tail as an appetizer, and my main course was grilled cod, fabulous fried baby potatoes, and zucchini. We will be visiting the restaurant, which is quite near the old city center, again.

About the photo: We went out the back door after we finished eating so we could get a better look at the river scenery. I was pleasantly surprised to see the boat Lady Helen docked there. I captured the scene using two photographs to be sure that I got all of the restaurant and the boat. I used Lightroom to merge the two images into a single panorama and then cropped out the parking lot on the left and other extraneous buildings on the right.

I sent the image to Luminar Neo, applied noise reduction, and did some final tweaking before exporting it for final display here and on my Flickr site. If you click on the image, you can view it in 2K HD there.

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

30 comments

  1. The click doesn’t work, but I can see the contrast between the modern, comfortable restaurant and the weary boat fetching all that good, fresh food.

    • That’s a good question.
      When I use my Nikon or Sony cameras, I stitch multiple images because they get transferred to DNG which is a much more versatile format than a JPG.
      Though most of my cellpic originals are in JPG instead of raw, in the early days of panorama apps on my cellphone, the action of moving the phone sometimes led to distortion. That distortion has never occurred when using Lightroom’s tool.
      I suspect that problem has been fixed in the newer phones, but I continue my “old ways” as I am used to them. By continuing to use Lightroom, the procedure is always the same for me, no matter which camera I am using.

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