New Orleans, Louisiana.

This winter, we envisioned a two-month Arizona escape preceded by a cozy January in North Carolina. A cross-country road trip was the planned journey, cleverly split by a Caribbean cruise departing from New Orleans. Mardi Gras slipped our minds, as Easter’s late arrival (March 31st) threw us off.

As our plan unfolded, we realized we’d be in “The Big Easy” just a couple of weeks before Ash Wednesday! Our cruise, departing February 4th and returning February 11th, offered a perfect window. So, we landed in New Orleans on February 1st, eager for a taste of the legendary Mardi Gras before setting sail.

On Friday, we got a taste of New Orleans floats. Before the weekend was over, we would learn that our hotel was at the end of one of the major parade routes and that floats are stored off-season in large lots only a few blocks from downtown. Our first glimpse of the parties to come was a procession of floats being transported to their storage location.

Stepping out into the cool night, we were met with the vibrant energy of our first Mardi Gras parade. Phones glowed, capturing the illuminated floats, while outstretched hands hoped to snag the expected beads and other treasures tossed their way.

The spectacle wasn’t confined to floats; young dancers from local schools, their ages spanning childhood to adulthood, twirled and leaped along the parade route, entrancing the crowds with their vibrant routines.

We stood at the parade’s tail end, where it trisected at the busy intersection. Floats glided straight ahead, bands and dancers split left and right, and their school bus transports waited patiently on the intersecting street, ready to whisk them away.

We pondered the ease of capturing those well-known Mardi Gras beads, wondering if snatching them would be a dance of triumph or defeat. To our surprise, the ladies in our group emerged as champions, their necks overflowing with those sparkly souvenirs. The generosity went beyond beads, with some groups even tossing colorful bags to carry the loot – a subtle nudge to help maintain the city’s pristine state after the revelry subsided.

The parade concluded, but the magic lingered. Three tricked-out trikes, glowing with LED lighting, parked near our hotel. Cell phone camera in hand, I became an instant paparazzi, even convincing a rider to pose with her dazzling chariot. Talk about rolling in style!

Saturday dawned, not with sunshine, but with a grumpy sprinkle of rain. Undeterred, we peeked out our hotel window to see the Mardi Gras party beginning anew. Umbrella? Nope. Poncho? Nada. But hey, the show must go on (and get a little soggy)! So, we bundled up in what we had and joined the damp (but determined) revelers below.

I actually felt sorry for the dance troop girls. Dressed in their parade finery, some like this group had ponchos, but not all groups did. The rain and cold did their best to dampen the spirits of the revelers, but they soldiered on. Sure, they might have been a little damp, but they proved that even Mother Nature can’t extinguish the Mardi Gras spirit.

Thanks to reader Ray Laskowitz. He educated me in a pair of comments in the Comments section of this blog about how the parades pay bands for their participation and how that funds their music programs. More details are in the comments under Ray’s name.

As the final floats rolled by, the crowd thinned, reluctantly surrendering to the strengthening rain. Unfortunately, the downpour intensified, forcing later parades to be canceled. While the weather wasn’t ideal, the spirit of Mardi Gras remained undimmed. The vibrant energy helped make the experience unforgettable despite the weather.

That evening we enjoyed dinner at the hotel so we wouldn’t have to go out in the weather. I captured many more images of Mardi Gras magic and posted them on my Flickr site here. Take a few minutes to check out the gallery in 2K HD.

Sunshine washed away the rain, leaving a warm Sunday morning in its wake. Lunch awaited us on the Norwegian Breakaway, followed by a 4:00 PM departure for our Caribbean escape. More adventures await, but those will have to wait for another tale.

John Steiner

Metairie, Louisiana.

I’m not a regular Adobe Photoshop user, even though I have a Photography subscription plan. I find Photoshop to be more work than it’s worth to me so unless I am doing something really special, I use Adobe Lightroom Classic mostly.

I have been intrigued by the Generative Fill AI tool in Photoshop as I’ve seen several videos of the Beta version in action. I vowed not to mess with beta versions of software many years ago, and I stuck to it. Well, recently Adobe released Photoshop 2024, and Generative Fill is now included in the program. Crossing the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Bridge presented an interesting example of how I could use the new AI tool to improve an image.

I was sitting in the back seat behind the driver in a Chevy Suburban. Since there are no “rest areas” or “scenic views” allowed on the causeway, I could only capture images from within the moving vehicle as we traveled at 65 MPH across the bridge. You can check my recent Travel Tuesday post here to see the images I captured as we crossed the largest overwater bridge in the world.

About the photo: I used my Samsung S23U to capture the panoramic view above, but it was marred by the presence of the windshield frame and rearview mirror. Here is the original image.

The first thing I did was send the image to Photoshop for my first published experiments with Generative Fill. The newly installed program launched with some legalese prompts regarding the new AI tool. Once the image loaded, I immediately used the lasso tool to draw a rough outline around the rearview mirror assembly. From the videos I’d watched, I knew to be sure to include some of the sky in my selection so Photoshop’s AI would know what to replace the selection with.

The tool generated three options and I picked the best of the three. All three included a section of the dark blue window tint at the top of the windshield. My second generative fill application included a selection of those darker blue areas. I used the text box to indicate “remove color cast” and the program did a pretty good job of removing the blue tint. I left the small section of blue tint that remained in the final image for you to see how well it did. I could have easily done some manual editing to completely eliminate the darker blue hue in the extreme upper right of the final image.

Finally, I used the lasso tool to make a rough circle around the dashboard, steering wheel, and the A-pillars on each side of the windshield. I was amazed at how well the AI extended the roadway and sidewalls into the bottom of the image. One of the three choices did have some distortion, and if I didn’t like any of them, I could have created three more tries with a single mouse click.

From there, I sent the image back into Lightroom Classic to correct the tilted horizon and then touched up the photo with my normal processing techniques. I can see Generative Fill will be useful to me on special occasions, and I can also see its potential for creative photography. As is my usual policy, whenever I use a tool like Generative Fill or replace a sky, I’ll be sure to ‘fess up.

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

Metairie, Louisiana.

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway bridges are a pair of parallel bridges that cross Lake Pontchartrain in southeastern Louisiana, United States. The longer of the two bridges is 23.83 miles (38.35 km) long, making it the longest continuous bridge over water in the world. The southern terminus of the causeway is in Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans, and the northern terminus is in Mandeville, Louisiana.

The causeway bridges were built in the 1950s and 1960s to provide a direct connection between New Orleans and the North Shore. Prior to the construction of the causeway, the only way to travel between the two shores was by ferry or by driving around the lake, which added about an hour to the journey.

There are seven crossovers on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, spaced approximately 3.5 miles (5.6 km) apart. The crossovers are meant to be for emergency stopping only. Crossovers are important safety features on the two bridges. They allow drivers to pull off the road if they experience a problem, such as a flat tire or a mechanical failure. The crossovers also provide a safe place for emergency vehicles to stop and respond to incidents.

If you ever need to use a crossover on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, be sure to pull over completely and turn on your hazard lights. There are also areas along the spans on the right side for emergency stops. There are no places for sightseers to pull off to take photos. All of these images were captured by my cellphone as we transited the northbound bridge.

Even at six miles (9.6 km), the north shore of the lake is all but invisible on the horizon. The speed limit is 65 MPH, and at that rate, it took us about 25 minutes to cross the causeway.

The causeway bridges are supported by over 9,000 concrete piles that are driven into the bottom of the lake. The bridges are made up of a series of prefabricated concrete slabs that were barged out to the construction site and assembled using a floating crane.

This view through the windshield shows that the bridges have tall sections that allow larger boats to pass underneath. If you click on the image to view it in Flickr, you can see one of the crossovers between the two bridges.

I experimented with some images captured from through the windshield of the Chevy Suburban we were in. I was seated in the rear seat behind the driver when I captured this image between the front seats. I used a new feature in Photoshop to create this panorama. I will fill you in on the details in the upcoming Cellpic Sunday. In the meantime, you can get a view of all these images in 2K HD on my Flickr site here.

John Steiner

Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

I have a Garmin Mini dashcam mounted behind the rearview mirror on the passenger side of my car. It’s barely visible to me, only the red recording indicator sticking below the bottom edge of the mirror mounted on the windshield above the dash.

Whenever someone is driving, it’s recording what it sees out the windshield. As we crossed the bridge, I could see what looked like a traffic backup onto the eastbound I-10 bridge onramp. We were driving westbound on the 1-10 in Baton Rouge, crossing over the Mississippi River on the Horace Wilkinson Bridge. An overturned vehicle blocked the onramp and at least one of the rightmost lanes on the I-10. As we got closer, two semi-trucks moving in the open eastbound lane blocked me from seeing what type of vehicle had overturned. Just after we passed the vehicle, I pushed the button on the back of the dashcam to protect that last minute of video from being erased as the memory card fills up.

The Garmin Mini captures a 1K- HD image, and its field of view is even wider than the image provided above for context. I think the overturned vehicle is either a box truck or a motor home, but those passing trucks made it impossible for me to get a closer look. The Garmin Mini has served me well, even capturing my spin-out when our car lost traction on black ice and put us in the median on I-80 one winter day in 2021.

About the photos: I unplugged the micro-USB card from the camera and took it to my laptop. I found the 1-minute clip in the saved video folder on the USB card and reviewed it. I paused the video at one point and used the Windows Snip-it program to capture the larger image. Then I used Snip-it again to capture a smaller section to provide a closer view.

I uploaded the two images into Luminar Neo and ran the upscale tool on the smaller image to provide a sharper image. On the larger image, I just ran the Supersharp tool. Upscaling provided more pixels while supersharp just modifies the existing pixels to increase sharpness.

I did very little else to either image, though the second image did benefit from tweaking the Image Enhance tool. Both images were then exported to 2K HD and posted on my Flickr site.

When my wife got a different car a few months ago, I purchased a 4K dashcam from Kenwood that provides a much clearer image. I’d like to upgrade this dashcam to a 4K model, but I saw from this exercise that the videos it produces are more than adequate, just not as sharp and clear as the 4K Kenwood in our other car.

If you have a dash cam and want to use it as evidence in documenting an accident, you should not make any changes to the raw video footage as it could be construed as tampering with evidence. In this case, I didn’t modify the original video in any way, I simply screen-grabbed part of a single frame of video, and changes were made only to those still frame images. Of course, there is no reason that I would need to save this clip other than to share the still photos here. I routinely reformat the chip in the camera on a regular basis to give it fresh space to write videos on our daily travels.

I decided to post the video on my Flickr site. At the end of the clip, you’ll see the overturned vehicle. The video is less than one minute in total.

One final note. We are still on our Transatlantic cruise, and have limited Internet time this week. I am reading all comments, but have no time to reply as usual. I look forward to seeing your Cellpic Sunday posts.

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