Strolling the cruise ship deck during the golden hour and at night creates memorable moments. I never tire of watching the sun dip below the horizon or the sight of moonlight reflecting upon the ocean. I rearranged images from my portable hard drives to my Network Attached Storage drive and found some cell phone pictures I’d not yet processed. These images brought back memories of those magical times at sea. Both were captured from the promenade deck of the Norwegian Bliss in November and December 2023.

About the photo: Processing this image from my Samsung S23U with more dynamic range was possible because I used Pro mode to process the resulting DNG file. I used the super telephoto lens to capture a close-up view of the setting sun. The detail in the thick band of clouds above was drawn out by a mixture of applications, the Structure and Enhanced AI tools in Luminar Neo. I ran the Noiseless tool, but the image was really showing only minor noise in the darkest areas. The picture was captured with an ISO of only 50, so noise was minimal and easily reduced.

About the photo: This image was captured near the coast of Guatemala. If you look carefully, you can see the lights of a port city on the horizon. I’m unsure why, but I noticed in the image above that the area near the horizon appears somewhat blurry. When I view it on my Flickr site, it’s much sharper. It probably helps that Flickr surrounds photos with a black border, while my WordPress theme surrounds them in white. You can click on either image to view them in 2K HD via Flickr.

The photo is a JPEG file, as I didn’t take advantage of the S23U’s Pro mode, which would have given me a DNG file. I used the camera’s ultra-wide lens using automatic exposure. The camera chose f/1.7 and 2000 ISO. As you might expect, the high ISO left much more noise in the image than in the sunset photo. After straightening the horizon and cataloging in Lightroom Classic, I used Luminar Neo’s Noiseless add-on to clean up the image. Enhanced AI brought out more details and increased exposure in the sky. Reviewing these photos reminded me of our next cruise. I’ll have to wait until October before we feel the motion of the ocean underneath our feet.

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

John Steiner