Miami, Florida.

I was up early on disembarkation day. We like to pack light and take our luggage off the ship, skipping the overnight pickup and the timed departure for picking up our stuff at the pier. It’s simply easier to walk off the ship with our luggage as soon as the ship clears customs and we “walk-offs” are allowed to leave.

We got ready for one more breakfast on the ship and I stepped out on the balcony. We were already docked when I awoke and around 6:30, I captured this image of the sunrise. It was still technically the blue hour as the sun hadn’t yet broken the horizon line and the long cruise ship causeway contained many ships getting ready to disgorge their passengers and accept a new cadre of guests.

About the photo: I captured the image with my Samsung S23U in pro mode, so I had a DNG file to work with. I’ve been using pro mode on this camera much more often as it is easier to extract the DNGs from the camera than in my previous Samsung. I loaded the file into Adobe Lightroom Classic to catalog it and use the geometric straightening tools. I also cropped the right edge. A cruise ship bow and our ship’s superstructure blocked my capture of the brightest area of the sky and those details didn’t add anything to the image.

From the basic adjustments, I sent it off to Luminar Neo for final processing. First on the agenda was noise reduction in the Noiseless app. Even at a high reduction setting, the left side still exhibits some noise artifacts, but Neo’s treatment removed most of the noise. An overhang from our ship blocked the upper right corner of the sky so an application of Luminar Neo’s Gen-Erase tool removed the obstruction. It did a nice job of recreating the sky in that area. A slight difference in shading could easily be attributed to that thin cloud layer just below the area I modified with one of Neo’s latest AI tools. Only a slight tweak of the Enhanced AI tool finished the image to my satisfaction and I was ready to share it here. Click on the image above to view it in 2K HD on my Flickr site if you want to pixel peep.

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

This week, Ann-Christine asks us to look into the future. She writes in her post on Leya, quoting Frank Herbert, “The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas.” You can read her entire challenge post here.

And so it is. We can only hope and plan for the future which may or may not come in the manner that we expect. This week, I am writing this on a cruise ship that’s docked in Cozumel, Mexico. I hope to get the post done before the day is out. I have a future excursion starting in a short couple of hours. The photo above, though, takes me back to February 8, just a few days ago when the Carnival Conquest left the dock at the Port of Miami.

Docked nearby was a vision of what could be our future in but a couple of months now. The Norwegian Escape, awaiting her own departure, will soon depart toward Italy. We’ve already purchased our plane tickets to Rome and plan to board the Escape at the port nearest Rome for a cruise along Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, and finally dock in Southhampton, England. It will be Lynn and my first trip to Europe. That is in our future, we hope, but we will never know until we actually set foot onboard.

That glass building, framed in red, is also for the future. It’s new construction that will become Norwegian Cruise Line’s new arrival and departure center. Judging from the amount of building materials we noticed as we passed by on the other side of the structure, they’ve got a few months to go before that building will be in any customer’s future.

My final image for this challenge features a small airplane towing a banner. It wasn’t yet Valentine’s Day but Terry and Lori are on board our ship. Coincidentally, the couple was standing near us on deck when the banner came by leaving a stunned Lori in surprise. I suspect Lori and Terry have a special Valentine’s Day in store on the ship tomorrow as we head back to Miami and home.

John Steiner

It was morning on disembarkation day at Miami. As usual, I was up early. The Norwegian Star, fresh from her voyage through the Panama Canal sat in port. Inside, the ship was already bustling with people getting ready to return to their daily lives after a 14-day vacation. The ship’s main deck atrium was already full with people sitting around awaiting their turn to depart, yet it was early enough that the ship hadn’t yet even cleared Customs.

I was standing on the Promenade Deck looking at the buildings across the channel from the cruise ship dock when another cruise ship proceeded into port. Looking online, I wasn’t able to determine where she was coming from for this post, but I did learn that by the end of the day this photo was taken, the Equinox would begin a Southern Caribbean 7-day itinerary.

About the photo:

I didn’t have my Nikon with me so I pulled my Samsung S7 cellphone out and captured a few images as the ship passed by. This image is my favorite as it happened to capture some of the Miami shoreline. I exported the image into Aurora 2019 for basic processing. I am always amazed at the detail captured by today’s modern digital image sensors. Tools like Aurora do a great job of pulling out those details that don’t show up well with the camera’s basic processing tools. In most browsers, you can click on the image to enlarge it for a better view of those details.

John Steiner