Everglades National Park, Florida.

When we visited Everglades National Park, we discovered it has a tram service providing a narrated park tour. Of course, we chose to take the tram. In addition to the wildlife we saw, about halfway through the tour, we stopped for visitors to take a rest break or stretch their legs, walking up the ramp leading to the tower’s first level.

The Shark Valley Observation Tower is the highest point visitors can reach by foot in Everglades National Park, standing at 70 feet (21 m) tall. It offers expansive views of the Everglades, stretching up to 20 miles (32 km) in all directions. The tower provides a panoramic view of the park’s diverse landscape, including sawgrass prairies, tree islands, and open water. In a future post about the park, I will share an image or two from the tower’s first level. The very top level is no longer open to visitors.

About the photo: Walking up the gently sloping ramp was a bit of a workout for us of a certain age. We stopped a few times to take a rest break. At one stop, I got a clear view of the tower and its height above the treetops. I used my Samsung S23U to take a vertical format photo. Once I loaded it into Adobe Lightroom Classic, I cropped it to a more square format to eliminate the large expanse of sky and treetops.

From there, I loaded it into Luminar Neo to apply Accent AI and used Relight to provide a bit more exposure to the face of the tower, which was in shadow from this perspective. One thing to be careful about is creating halos around objects with exposure tools and masks. I only raised the Relight slider a small amount as the control was sensitive to adding halos on the top surfaces of the concrete structure. Sometimes, it’s a happy medium when trying to boost exposure. That first level doesn’t appear to have a halo, but if you look closely, you’ll notice the disks above the first and top levels are just starting to halo.

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