Arches National Park, Utah.

Last weekend I spent way too much time looking for a couple of photos I knew I’d taken and were somewhere on a hard drive along with my other thousands of photographs. I’ve been using Lightroom for both photo processing and as an image catalog for many years, and I have taken great pride in keeping track of my image collection. I was frustrated that I couldn’t find the original images for a post I’d made on my blog quite some time ago. I wanted to find the original to apply a new processing technique from what I know I would have done to the image for that post awhile back.

The short story is that I finally found the originals along with a collection of over 450 images captured on a cell phone I no longer own. When I upgraded cell phones, I’d moved all of the images to a single folder in a personal photos directory and neglected to import them into Lightroom. Those early blog images were processed with Adobe Photoshop Elements. This discovery, freshly imported into Lightroom will now provide me with many weeks of Cellpic Sunday images.

About the photo: If you look carefully underneath the large rock on the right, you’ll see a trail. That’s the hiking trail known as Courthouse Wash. From a quick Google search, I found lots of information about the 5.5 mile (8.8 km) trail. It’s apparently an easy and relatively level hike along a wash and will take 3-4 hours to complete for the average hiker. I didn’t know the trail existed when I took the photo. I was simply struck by the color of the trees and the red rock background.

The image above isn’t the photo I was looking for, but was one of the many images I captured on my cell phone while traveling through Utah in October, 2013. The late fall trip found us on a highway that crosses Courthouse Wash. I happened to snap two images that were close enough together to create a panorama. I know that’s courthouse wash because there is a sign that says so. It’s near the center of the image and is almost invisible unless you “zoom into” the image. The original image quality allowed easy reading of the sign using Lightroom’s scaling feature. On most browsers, you can click on the image above to get a larger view. There, you will be able to see the sign, but on my computer, I couldn’t read it from that scale distance. The rule for Cellpic Sunday is simple. The image (or in this case, images) must be captured on a mobile device.

John Steiner