London, England.

A quick note for Cellpic Sunday followers. This weekend, we are visiting friends and out taking fall photos. I will likely be behind in checking this post for comments and shared links, but I will be responding as usual if a bit tardy. Now, on to the topic for today…

Shortly after visiting Buckingham Palace (we didn’t get in, the King was in residence), we walked around the area. As we traveled down Birdcage Walk across from Saint James’s Park, we spotted two mounted police officers. There was a bit of a line of cars backed up behind the officers as the opposing lane had some traffic. As this photo was taken, the first car in line had the turn signal on and was just getting ready to pass the officers.

The Metropolitan Police (The Met) have a long history of mounted patrols. The Mounted Branch of The Met boasts an extensive and illustrious heritage tracing its origins to 1760. Its origin was primarily aimed at addressing the challenge posed by highwaymen in the city of London.

The mounted branch is a close-knit team with a wide range of responsibilities. They conduct high-visibility patrols in London, which helps to deter crime and make the public feel safer. They also escort the military and the Royal Household in central London, which is a key counter-terrorism role. Additionally, they play a vital role in anti-violence and priority crime initiatives across London.

They also engage with the community, which helps to build positive relations with hard-to-reach communities. The Mounted Branch also specializes in crowd control at sporting events, demonstrations, public order events, and state ceremonial occasions such as Trooping the Colour. Finally, they care for and maintain the horses and tack, which is essential for their work.

The high vantage point and versatility of Mounted Branch officers make them a valued police resource.  The Mounted Branch has a horse strength of approximately 110, with 117 police officers, plus police staff across seven sites. A normal tour of duty for a Mounted Branch officer consists of a patrol of three to four hours. You can find more information about the Mounted Branch here.

About the photo: This 12,000 x 9,000-pixel image was captured with my Samsung S20U. I had lots of pixels to play with so I started by cropping it into a pseudo-panoramic image. It was lightly raining and the skies were shrouded in clouds. To emphasize the hazy nature of the atmosphere, I used Adobe Lightroom to create a gradient mask from the upper left to approximately the middle of the image diagonally. That put the sky and trees in the right background in the gradient area. I then used the dehaze function to actually increase the haze by moving the slider left instead of right.

From there, I exported the file to Luminar Neo and tweaked the image with structure. I noticed just a slight amount of motion blur in the image so I used the Supersharp tool with “Motion blur” checked to increase the sharpness of the image. You can click on the image above to view it in 2K HD via my Flickr site.

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