Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

I have a Garmin Mini dashcam mounted behind the rearview mirror on the passenger side of my car. It’s barely visible to me, only the red recording indicator sticking below the bottom edge of the mirror mounted on the windshield above the dash.

Whenever someone is driving, it’s recording what it sees out the windshield. As we crossed the bridge, I could see what looked like a traffic backup onto the eastbound I-10 bridge onramp. We were driving westbound on the 1-10 in Baton Rouge, crossing over the Mississippi River on the Horace Wilkinson Bridge. An overturned vehicle blocked the onramp and at least one of the rightmost lanes on the I-10. As we got closer, two semi-trucks moving in the open eastbound lane blocked me from seeing what type of vehicle had overturned. Just after we passed the vehicle, I pushed the button on the back of the dashcam to protect that last minute of video from being erased as the memory card fills up.

The Garmin Mini captures a 1K- HD image, and its field of view is even wider than the image provided above for context. I think the overturned vehicle is either a box truck or a motor home, but those passing trucks made it impossible for me to get a closer look. The Garmin Mini has served me well, even capturing my spin-out when our car lost traction on black ice and put us in the median on I-80 one winter day in 2021.

About the photos: I unplugged the micro-USB card from the camera and took it to my laptop. I found the 1-minute clip in the saved video folder on the USB card and reviewed it. I paused the video at one point and used the Windows Snip-it program to capture the larger image. Then I used Snip-it again to capture a smaller section to provide a closer view.

I uploaded the two images into Luminar Neo and ran the upscale tool on the smaller image to provide a sharper image. On the larger image, I just ran the Supersharp tool. Upscaling provided more pixels while supersharp just modifies the existing pixels to increase sharpness.

I did very little else to either image, though the second image did benefit from tweaking the Image Enhance tool. Both images were then exported to 2K HD and posted on my Flickr site.

When my wife got a different car a few months ago, I purchased a 4K dashcam from Kenwood that provides a much clearer image. I’d like to upgrade this dashcam to a 4K model, but I saw from this exercise that the videos it produces are more than adequate, just not as sharp and clear as the 4K Kenwood in our other car.

If you have a dash cam and want to use it as evidence in documenting an accident, you should not make any changes to the raw video footage as it could be construed as tampering with evidence. In this case, I didn’t modify the original video in any way, I simply screen-grabbed part of a single frame of video, and changes were made only to those still frame images. Of course, there is no reason that I would need to save this clip other than to share the still photos here. I routinely reformat the chip in the camera on a regular basis to give it fresh space to write videos on our daily travels.

I decided to post the video on my Flickr site. At the end of the clip, you’ll see the overturned vehicle. The video is less than one minute in total.

One final note. We are still on our Transatlantic cruise, and have limited Internet time this week. I am reading all comments, but have no time to reply as usual. I look forward to seeing your Cellpic Sunday posts.

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