Niagara Falls, New York.

This week we spent the day touring the Canadian and American Falls. In a future post, I’ll have a complete review of the comprehensive tour of the falls from a tour company in Niagara Falls. After getting up close and personal with the mighty falls via one of the Maid of the Mist excursion boats, we were truly drenched, the ponchos they gave us notwithstanding. I used a plastic bag to protect my camera from the spray that is inevitable when getting close to the falls. But I digress, this post is not from below the falls. It was captured from the top of the observation tower on the American side of the falls. The tower rises above the Niagara River Gorge some 282 feet (86 m) above the docks where visitors can board the Maid of the Mist tour boats.

About the photo: I used my Samsung S20U to capture several images from the top of the observation tower. If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know that I love to create large panoramic images. With today’s cell phones, that function is built into many camera apps. I prefer, however, to use Lightroom’s panoramic stitching tool as I have more control over the process. On the left is the American Falls, and in the center is the right side of the Canadian Falls, the view of that falls is partially blocked by a bend in the river gorge. On the right, you can see the hotels and other buildings on the Canadian side of the gorge.

Once I completed the tweaks and stitching in Adobe Lightroom, I sent the image off to Luminar Neo for final processing.

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

Las Vegas, Nevada.

In a story to be published later this year, I will share some pics and interesting experiences on a trip to Vegas in March 2022. We don’t go to Vegas a lot, but it’s only a 4.5-hour drive from Buckeye and we would be meeting my niece and her husband there for a few days.

They like to stay at the Main Street Station hotel which is downtown and just a block or so from the Freemont Experience. For those who are unfamiliar, several blocks of Freemont Street are covered with a large video display.

If you walk the five blocks at the western end of Freemont Street, you’ll pass casinos, shops, restaurants, and plenty of buskers who entice you to stop and drop a few bucks while you watch their outdoor shows. But this story is about that giant display that runs over the top of the pedestrian mall. As you can see in the image above taken during the day, directly underneath the giant screen is even a zipline. I included the daytime image to give you a better perspective as pedestrians walk the mall.

About the photo: The real point of this post is the opening photo. Every evening, a music video plays on a rotating schedule. It is usually graphics mixed with videos of the performers singing or whatever. One evening we were walking the mall with the nightly performance underway. I noticed a familiar sight in the middle of the video screen. Yes, that’s a standard Microsoft error dialog box. It’s an unhandled exception error from the Microsoft.NET Framework.

I captured the image with my Samsung S20U. Then I rotated the image in processing so that you could more easily read the error message. It would appear that the Freemont Experience program is completely automated with no one monitoring the display for such errors. The dialog box remained on the giant screen for the entire presentation.

Processing the brightly colored images was very simple. I didn’t even bother with the tweaks that I often make in Luminar, just adjusting the basic image controls in Adobe Lightroom to improve contrast and clarity.

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