Independence Day, 2021 at West Fargo, North Dakota.

This week’s Cellpic Sunday falls on the Fourth of July holiday for the United States of America. Given the drought and dry conditions throughout much of the country, I suspect the annual fireworks displays around the country may be curtailed to some degree especially in locations that could be susceptible to the wildfires that might be the result of a large pyrotechnic display.

Whether you have the benefit of a fireworks display or not, please accept my wish for a safe and happy Independence Day for those who celebrate the beginnings of our country’s independence.

Every few years, in West Fargo, North Dakota the Pyrotechnics Guild International held a demonstration that rotates around the country each year. Unfortunately for residents of the Fargo-Moorhead metro area, the West Fargo Fairgrounds is no longer suitable for this large display of fireworks from vendors around the country. There is too much new residential growth near the fairgrounds for the fireworks program to operate safely.

About the photo: This image was captured with my Samsung S7 on August 11, 2017. I let the camera operate in fully automatic mode and it did a nice job of setting the camera’s exposure to pick up not only the brightest dots, but to capture the more subtle light of the clouds of smoke from the flurry of rockets launched from the display area. I processed the image via Adobe Lightroom.

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, 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

Note: Last week’s Cellpic Sunday featured a mural being painted in response to the PPAC Challenge. That mural is now complete. If you’d like to check out the final mural, I’ve posted a photo of the completed mural at the bottom of the original post here.

Yesterday I attended a meeting in Bismarck. This trip, I was a passenger and I left the flying duties to Chad, a flight instructor and head of our flight standards department in North Dakota Civil Air Patrol. The sun was behind us, still low in the sky, when we departed Fargo early in the morning aboard a Cessna 182. Reflected on the clouds ahead of us, we saw a circular rainbow. Over my two decades of flying, I’ve seen a few circular rainbows reflected on clouds below us. We were on an instrument flight plan which allowed us to remain at our altitude and fly through any clouds that happened to rise above our flight level. As we approached one of these higher cloud layers, I saw something I’d never seen before. We could clearly see the shadow of our aircraft on the cloud directly in the center of the circle.

The closer we got to the vertical wall of the cloud bank, the larger our shadow became until a fleeting moment just past this point when we disappeared into the cloud. The rainbow circle didn’t change in size, only the shadow of the aircraft.

The first appearance of the rainbow circle was when the cloud deck was lower. The further west we flew, the higher the deck. We stayed at the same 6000 feet for the duration of this photo set. Though the circle in the photo appears vertical, it was reflecting on the horizontal layer of clouds below us. I increased the saturation of the image to more clearly show the rainbow circle in this shot. In “real life”, the circle was only slightly more intense than the surrounding cloud layer. The dark bands are artifacts created on the camera sensor by the spinning propeller. These images were captured on my Samsung S7 cell phone. The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple, the image must be captured on a mobile device.

John Steiner

About 20 miles east of Grand Forks, North Dakota on Highway 2, a pleasant side trip will find you at North Dakota’s Turtle River State Park. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s, the park attracts visitors all the year around. The river is stocked with trout and anyone of the child persuasion can even borrow fishing gear from the park office to try their hand at catching a rainbow, no license required.

Lynn and I visited the park during mid-September. The weather was quite comfortable, and since it was early fall, there was only a hint of the fall colors to come in the next few weeks.  During our stay, we hiked several trails. The park is more popular in the summer, and even in the winter when there are over seven miles of groomed trails for cross country skiing and snowshoe enthusiasts. On this day, however, we only met a few hikers along the trails we hiked.

As we walked from the parking lot and into one of the more forested trails, we quickly learned that the mosquitos can be voracious. They swarmed around and landed on us mercilessly. But we came prepared. Scampering back to the car, I found our can of Deep Woods Off! We soaked our pants and hoodies and our exposed flesh.

I must say I’m a big fan of Deet, the active ingredient of this repellent. It was fascinating to watch the little buggers swarm around us like the mud and dust that swirls around Charles Schultz’s character, Pig Pen. They followed us like a cloud, but it was like the repellent was an invisible shield. We never saw one penetrate the “force field.”

I have no relationship with Off! or any of the company’s other products. I just know that with West Nile and other nasty mosquito borne illnesses, I won’t venture out without it. There may be other repellents that work as well, but it ain’t broke, so I ain’t fixin’ it. We got back to the hotel in Grand Forks that night with zero mosquito bites.

The New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s economic answer to the Great Depression created the CCC. The Corps put  many of the nation’s unemployed to work on construction projects. Many such projects were underway in North Dakota. At Larimore, ND, a contingent of 185 young men started construction on the park in 1935. By the time they were done in the early 1940s, the Woodland Lodge was the park’s featured building.

Our hikes that day included trips along several trails that provided several views of the river. We planned to take some sunset photos, but by later in the day, an overcast came in, essentially shutting off any chance of gathering any decent sunset photos. No matter, our plan was to head back to the park the next morning to capture a sunrise in the park. Those images will be featured in an upcoming post. In the meantime, please review the gallery of images below. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

On a mid-September day, I was returning from Bismarck to Fargo, returning from a Civil Air Patrol activity. The aircraft was on autopilot, so I took a moment to capture a photo of this small North Dakota town just north of I-94.

The 2013 population of the town was only 306, but in February 1983, national headlines focused on the small community. Largely forgotten, the shootout with tax protester Gordon Kahl left two U.S. Marshals dead. Kahl stole a police car and escaped to Arkansas where four months later, he was killed in another shootout. For a historical perspective and more details on the events of the day in this small North Dakota town, check out this article from the Bismarck Tribune written on the 25th anniversary of the gun battle. You can find it here.

About the photo: The image was captured on a Samsung S7 cell phone, F/1.7 at 1/1800 sec, ISO-50. It was edited on an iPad. The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple, the image must be captured and edited on a mobile device.

John Steiner

This week for reason or reasons unknown to me, WordPress did not publish a weekly photo challenge. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to challenge myself, i decided to look through my archives of photo challenge posts and attempt to meet a previous challenge with a new image. At random, I picked “Split-Second Story” as the notion of telling a story in a single image is intriguing. My original photo challenge response can be found here. And if you want to read the entire original challenge, you can find it here.

My challenge response photo features a Native American with his daughter, both dressed in ceremonial clothes, both participating in the Crossroads Powwow, held in May 2016 in our home town of Fargo.

Next week, I’m told the WordPress photo challenge will continue. I always look forward to finding images that meet their challenge.

John Steiner

A few days ago, on our daily walk to the local mall, we spotted this beautiful tractor-trailer rig. I couldn’t resist snapping a pic with my S7. After editing it on my iPad and uploading it to share, I decided to learn a bit about the company. Founded in 1974, the Winter Haven, Florida based company is a large transport company that focuses on food grade products. The tanker trailer in the photo is probably carrying dairy or fruit juice product.

Parked as it is, just off the I-29 ramps, I suspect it is either on its way to or from Canada as a large part of their market is import/export of product to Canada and Mexico. They have a fleet of over 700 tractors and 1,000 trailers.

About the photo:

The capture from a Samsung S7 was cropped for effect and a filter applied via my iPad’s photo editor. After completing the edit and uploading here, I noticed that the filter distorted the sky slightly in the vicinity of the rig’s dual radio antennas. I also would have preferred to crop the image to eliminate the large light pole behind the trailer on the right. That would have cut off some of the lettering on the trailer. I preferred to leave the writing intact and live with the light pole. A short session in Adobe Lightroom on my laptop would correct the distortion and make the light pole disappear, but that would violate the one rule of Cellpic Sunday. The image must be captured and edited via a mobile device.

John Steiner

Yesterday our Civil Air Patrol (CAP) flight crew spent just under five hours “chasing” an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) as part of an agricultural research data gathering project for North Dakota State University. The North Dakota Wing CAP has been supporting this research all summer. My volunteer job for this project includes monitoring communications to help ensure safe flight operations of the unmanned aircraft in public air space. Consequently, I spend lots of time watching the other activities at the airport. In a future post, I will put together a gallery of images from the UAS operation.

Yesterday was a relatively windless North Dakota day so the resident aerial applicator (popularly known as a crop duster) was busy applying fertilizer to nearby farmer’s fields. About every thirty minutes, the pilot would return to the airport and he and his assistant would load another batch of liquid fertilizer. This operation is going on right outside the door of our communications trailer. I am not an expert in identifying aircraft designed for aerial application, but I believe this aircraft is manufactured by Air Tractor Inc.

About the photograph: Though the engine appears to be stopped, the prop is turning the entire time during the refill. My cellphone camera has a fast enough shutter speed to stop the motion of the prop in the image. The wingtip in the foreground is only about 8-10 feet (3 m) from where I was standing in the doorway of my operations trailer. The image was captured with my Samsung S7 cell phone using automatic exposure mode. For the technically inclined, shutter speed was 1/5600, aperture f/1.7 and ISO 50. That 1/5600 shutter speed is the reason the prop appears to be stopped.

John Steiner

At exit 100, on I-29, the rest area and visitor centers have an artistic bas relief sculptured look above the main windows. The photo above is a cellphone capture of the visitor center on the northbound side of the interstate. The southbound side has a different image sculpted into the wall above the window.

The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple. The image must be captured and edited on a mobile device. Captured on a Samsung S7 cell phone, edited on an iPad.

John Steiner

Last week, I needed to head to Bismarck for some vehicle maintenance on the Civil Air Patrol vehicle I use for my volunteer work. Just east of Bismarck on I-94, the Apple Creek Rest Area is at Milepost 168; Westbound. I don’t usually stop there as it’s so close to my destination. Nature called, however, so I pulled off the Interstate and was surprised to see the rest area looks like an early 20th century gas station, complete with two antique gas pumps. The only thing missing was the rubber hose service bell (never mind there was no driveway to drive a vehicle up to the pump for a fuel fill.)

The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple, the image must be taken and edited on a mobile device. This photo was taken with a Samsung S7 cell phone, edited on an iPad.

John Steiner

Many of my regular readers know of my interest in aviation and membership in a volunteer organization called the Civil Air Patrol. This summer, we have a long-term mission in the small town of Hillsboro, North Dakota. The mission is not by any means secret, is agriculture based, and it is being prosecuted in cooperation with North Dakota State University.Photos from the mission will find their way to these pages, but they will have to wait until we get authorization to publish from national headquarters.

In the meantime, this image submitted for Cellpic Sunday was captured while mission participants are training for the project. The photo captures the agricultural nature of North Dakota and the state’s ties to aviation. One of the primary aviation businesses in North Dakota is aerial application. The small business website Manta.com lists 41 aviation-related companies that support farmers in the production of products grown on the fertile fields of North Dakota. The spray plane in the foreground does its part in helping to keep those grain storage elevators in the background full.

The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple. The image must be captured and edited on a mobile device. This photo was captured on a Samsung S7, edited on an iPad.

John Steiner