Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

We enjoyed our short visit to Rio and saw most of the iconic touristy places, but on Sail Away Day, we arrived at the pier before noon ready to board. After some disorganization in the process, we finally boarded the Norwegian Star. Soon it was time for the party on deck. Of course, I was more interested in the beautiful sunset appearing over the mountains in Brazil.

About the photo: When I loaded the image into Lightroom Classic, I noticed that my Samsung S23U captured too much of the deck and not enough of the sunset. Of course, I can’t blame the camera for my poor choice of composition. The deck was crowded with partiers and there were lots of heads at the bottom of the photo. In Lightroom Classic, I cropped the bottom and right side as much as I dared but there were still a few heads sticking up into the bottom of the image. I used Photoshop’s Generative Fill to remove the distractions. I am amazed at how well it determines what the background should be and makes intelligent attempts at replacement.

Once the removals were complete, I exported the image into Luminar Neo for final edits. There were some wires that were in the image above the cruise ship’s superstructure. Neo’s Powerline Removal tool made them go away. I added just a touch of Golden Hour enhancement and tweaked the structure in the sky to smooth the clouds a bit.

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

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

We arrived in Rio on the afternoon of March 17 2023 and had two days to explore Rio before boarding our ship for the transatlantic cruise. That evening we went for a walk and passed by the building in the photo above. The building’s architecture spoke to me and I tried several photos from different angles. There was no signage that told me of the purpose of the building, but I figured that when I got home, I’d look up the coordinates captured on my phone with the photo and Google Maps would tell me the details.

Well, not so much. It turned out that somehow I’d shut off the GPS location tagging so none of my photos from Rio or from the first couple of stops in Brazil were tagged with GPS coordinates. It appeared from the fencing in front of the main entrance that the building might be in the middle of a renovation, but I have no other reason to believe that.

Three clues to the building included running the Neo sharpness tool to look more closely at the facade. First, the street number on the building is 291. There are also two posters flanking the doors that make me think the building might be a theater. The sharpened portions of the posters are below.

For those of you who might have an idea of the location and name of this beautiful building, please leave a comment. Note: Thanks to Lookoom’s comment below, the mystery has been solved. It is the Copacabana Palace Theater, located about a two-minute walk from our hotel. Check out his travel blog here.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make out any of the last names of the people listed on the posters. In the poster above, I could see three first names. There are four people in the poster and it appears the female is named Georgi, though I think Georgi would be uncommon for Brazilian names. But then, what do I know about Brazilian names? Not much.

About the photo: Captured on my Samsung S23U, we explored the area near our hotel for a place to eat dinner, and upon our return, we passed the building. The Samsung S23U does a much better job at night photography than my Sony, plus it’s the camera that I always have with me. I didn’t take my Nikon on this trip as we traveled with minimal gear so we wouldn’t have to check luggage on the airplane segments of our trip. Once I downloaded the image into Lightroom Classic, I tried to straighten the vertical lines but discovered that doing so cropped too much of the image. I manually adjusted for lean as much as I dared and sent the image to Luminar Neo for final tweaks, basically Enhanced AI and Noiseless. I only used the Sharpness tool after completing the final image just to see if I could read the text on the signs. As I noted above, that was marginally helpful.

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

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Selarón Steps, also known as Escadaria Selarón, are a well-known set of steps in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The run-down stairway was transformed into a work of art by Chilean-born artist Jorge Selarón, who began renovating the stairsteps in 1990 with tiles in the colors of Brazil (yellow, green, and blue) and his home country of Chile (red). Over the years, Selarón collected tiles from all over the world, and the steps eventually became a mosaic of over 2,000 tiles, many donated by tourists from over 60 countries.

The steps are located in the Lapa neighborhood of Rio, and they connect the lower neighborhood of Lapa with the upper neighborhood of Santa Teresa. As you can see from my photos here, the steps are a popular tourist destination. On the day we visited, it was third in the number of visitors, less crowded than Sugarloaf Mountain, and the most popular site, Christ the Redeemer. Since the area is so small, however, it actually seemed more crowded than Sugarloaf.

Selarón worked on the steps for over 20 years until his death in 2013. He considered the steps a “tribute to the Brazilian people,” and he said that he wanted them to symbolize peace and unity. I found a fascinating article on the web archive site here, referenced as a footnote in Selarón’s Wikipedia entry.

Selarón collected tiles from worldwide, including Brazil, Chile, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece, France, Japan, China, and the United States. He started the project by renovating the steps in front of his house, number 24, about halfway up the 215 steps. From there, he expanded the project to continue along Manuel Carneiro street/stairway, the steep connector between Joaquim Silva and Pinto Martins streets.

The image of a pregnant African woman is a theme of over 300 hand-painted tiles. Though not in the image I captured, in many of the tiles she is holding a fish. According to a web archive page reference that I found here, the pregnant African women helped fund his work on the steps. On that page, he noted, “I painted paintings to earn some money so that I would be able to continue my work. Since 1977, I have painted and drawn over 25,000 pregnant women, my choice of subject due to a past personal issue.”

He continued, “The tourists and travellers from all over the world who visit my work are very important, because they buy my paintings and postcards that enable me to continue my masterpiece – and they take my story with them to other lands. I always dream that each of them will send me a tile from their country to include in the stairway, a dream that I hope will become a reality.” His article ended with a premonition of sorts, “This crazy and unique dream will only end on the day of my death,” and signed Selarón

Tragically, he died under mysterious circumstances, his body found on the steps of his “tribute to the Brazilian people” with burn marks. Officially his death was recorded as a suicide. He was 65 years old.

John Steiner

Officially known as the President Costa e Silva Bridge, the second-longest bridge in Latin America connects the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói and spans Guanabara Bay. When construction was completed in 1974, and until 1985, it was the world’s second-longest bridge, second only to the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in the United States.

The box girder design carries eight lanes of traffic on BR-101 and is 8.26 miles (13.29 km) long. At its highest point, its 236-foot (76 m) height allows most ships to pass through the bay.

About the photo: I captured the image on my Samsung S23U in two images from a deck on the Norwegian Star. I set the camera to its widest angle format and created a left and right image that I joined together in Adobe Lightroom. We weren’t that close to the bridge as we cruised away from Rio, but if we were closer, it would have been even harder to capture the entire length of the bridge. Click on the image above to pixel-peep 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

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Before the pandemic, we wanted to do a transatlantic cruise. It took a couple of extra years to accomplish that goal, but to make up for the lost time, we took a different tack from our original goal of departing for Europe from the eastern United States.

Lynn and I, along with our traveling companions, my niece Patricia and her husband, Gary started reviewing the available transatlantic cruises departing in March 2023. I happened to notice a Norwegian Cruise Line transit leaving from Rio de Janeiro to Barcelona on a 15-day trek. Having only previously stopped in Colombia, a visit to Brazil would give us an additional country to visit in South America.

We chose to arrive in Rio two days early and leave Barcelona two days after our cruise. That would give us one full day each to explore the two cities. Having so little time, we decided to check out available all-day tours. Pat suggested that we check out a tour aggregator called Viator, a subsidiary of Tripadvisor. This post is a review of one of the tours Viator listed. The tour we chose here was nine hours, and we were allowed some flexibility in the sites to visit. On the tour description, there are over 250 reviews. At the time of this writing, 247 of them were 5-star. When I am done with this post, there will be one more 5-star review.

The tour we chose has a long name, “Private Custom Full-Day in Rio including Christ, Sugar Loaf and Selaron Steps” but what attracted us most was that it is a private tour. We had a driver and a tour guide who picked us up at our hotel in the morning, and nine hours later, dropped us off again at the hotel. We were offered some flexibility given the time constraints. We were asked if we had any “priority” stops on our tour. Our only request for an extra stop came from me. The beach next to Copacabana is Ipanema made popular in the United States from that bossa nova song “The Girl From Ipanema.” I couldn’t leave Rio without visiting a place I’d heard about since the 1960s. The guide promised to add the beach to our itinerary as it is just west of Copacabana Beach and our hotel, the Ibis Copacabana Posto 2.

For those of us of a certain age (in our cases, over 60), we had an advantage courtesy of the Brazilian government. Almost all venues had a line that was open only to seniors. The law passed in 2003 is called the Estatuto do Idoso (Senior Citizens Statute). It states that seniors have the right to “prioridade no atendimento” (priority in service) in a variety of settings, including banks, government offices, and public transportation. This means that seniors are allowed to go to the front of the line and be served first. The only place where we weren’t provided this courtesy was at the tram site where we waited to board to ride to the top of the mountain at Christ the Redeemer. Our tour guide was always careful to put us in the senior’s line when it was available.

Time for lunch was offered and we elected to stop for an hour at mid-day to take advantage. Lunch, like the tickets to the venues, was not included in the price of the tour. Even so, the use of a guide, driver, and vehicle for nine hours was not overpriced. Pricing is per group with a minimum of about $280 USD for up to three people at this writing. Our fee for four people was about $450 USD. Groups of up to 15 people are accommodated. The only real complaint we had is that the vehicle was a bit small for six people, the driver and the guide occupied the front seats. The two people in the back seats were a bit cramped. Fortunately, the rides were all relatively short between venues.

Our tour started at our hotel, but we could have chosen to be picked up at the airport or the cruise terminal. After our lunch break, the options for an art, historical, or nature tour were our choices. We opted for the historical tourist sites.

Many of the stops we made were short and had free admission, but often those were sites that had some historical interest. For example, the Metropolitan Cathedral was only a 10-minute stop. We passed by a few places without stopping, only listening to the guide’s narration.

As the sun was slipping behind the mountains, our final tour stop was Ipanema Beach. We were there only about 15 minutes or so. The driver dropped us and the guide off and, judging from the traffic and lack of parking, probably just drove around until it was time for us to reboard for the ride back to our hotel.

Viator helped to make our visit to Rio de Janeiro an unforgettable experience. Our guide was very fluent in English so we had no communication issues. I read through the negative reviews (only four with 2 or 1 star) and noted most were related to lack of experience by their tour guide. This was not a problem for us. Our tour guide was knowledgeable and friendly. Out of 262 reviews, 242 were given 5 stars, and seven with 4 stars.

When we completed our order through Viator, we were given the specific contact information for the tour company, Way to Know Rio as well as the Viator Customer Care number. The payment was charged to a credit card a couple of days before the tour started and free cancelation was offered at least 24 hours in advance of the date of our tour.

With only one day to tour the city, we only scratched the surface of what Rio has to offer, but I am glad we added the extra day before boarding the ship. It gave us the opportunity to experience a small part of this amazing city.

John Steiner

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Christ the Redeemer statue, known as “Cristo Redentor” in Portuguese, is one of the most iconic landmarks in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The idea for a statue atop Corcovado Mountain was first proposed in the mid-1850s by a Brazilian Catholic priest named Pedro Maria Boss. It was another 80 years before the statue came to be, however.

Construction of the project began in 1922 and was completed in 1931. The French sculptor Paul Landowski designed the statue, while the Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa oversaw its construction. The monument was built using reinforced concrete and soapstone, and the exterior was covered with triangular tiles.

The statue was officially inaugurated on October 12, 1931, and it quickly became a popular tourist attraction. Over the years, the sculpture has undergone several restorations and improvements to maintain its structural integrity and preserve its appearance. Cristo Redentor has become an iconic symbol not only of Rio de Janeiro but also of Brazil as a whole. It is considered one of the New Seven Wonders of the World and attracts millions of visitors each year, offering breathtaking panoramic views of the city from its location atop Corcovado Mountain.

On our visit to Rio, of course, we saw the statue “up close and personal” along with many hundreds of other visitors that day. One of our other stops for the day found us taking the cable cars to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain about four miles (6.3 km) as a helicopter might fly between the tops of the two mountains. It is from the Sugarloaf mountaintop that I saw this view of Christ the Redeemer.

About the photo: I was just learning about my Samsung S23 Ultra, a new phone purchased just prior to our trip and I was looking for chances to try out the two telephoto lens modules built into the camera. In addition to the standard lens, the S23 Ultra uses two telephoto lenses each using dedicated modules with relatively small image sensors and 3x (69mm) and 10x (230mm) zoom factors, respectively. I have quite a few comparison shots with the three lenses, but for now, I am sharing this view of the statue with the Super Telephoto lens module.

From where I was with the camera on Sugarloaf Mountain, I selected the 10X module at minimum zoom. I could have zoomed digitally even closer, but according to my research on the S23U, image quality falls off quickly as the zoom level is increased. After importing into Lightroom Classic and from there to Luminar Neo, I found I had to make some compromises. The image had the mountain shrouded in clouds, especially in the background. The backlit image, however, lacked contrast, and attempts to keep the clouds and yet improve the contrast became an exercise in futility. I opted to find a balance between the two extremes. At some point, I may reprocess the image with a mask on the foreground mountain and bring the background cloudiness back to see what that looks like.

Prior to adjusting anything else, however, I had to deal with the larger mountain in the background. On the highest ridge of that mountain, a large antenna farm providing communications to the city needed to “disappear.” Luminar Neo’s erase module worked well. When using Neo’s erase module, I have a tip for you that I learned about the hard way soon after learning Neo’s erase tool. When you have multiple areas to erase, don’t just open the erase module and make all erasures in one session. At some point, it’s likely that one of the erases will duplicate unwanted areas or create anomalies that spoil the session.

Instead, as in this case, I erased one tower, then I closed the erase tool and reopened it again. I erased another tower and again closed the tool. The advantage here is that if an erasure fails, you can undo that session and revert the image to the last good erasure. Sometimes the erase module has an issue that is best fixed with the clone tool so reworking the last erasure as a clone may be the way to proceed.

You can view the final image on my Flickr site in 2K HD by clicking on the image above. I will be sharing many more images from Rio in future posts, many with the S23U. As we were traveling light, I left my Nikon D500 at home bringing instead my Sony RX100V. I will be evaluating the many images I captured on both cameras whether or not I can leave the Sony at home and rely instead on the S23U. My first impression is when traveling with minimal camera gear, the Sony appears to be better at low light, and among other things, I can easily bracket the Sony for HDR images. It’s small and almost as inconspicuous as the S23U. As I work through the images over the next few weeks, I’ll let you know what I finally decide.

Quick note: we are on the road for a couple of days for family activities. I may be slower than normal in responding to comments.

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, Anne tells of a treasured trip to Australia and asks us to share some of our own. You can read her challenge post here.

As this is being written, we are in Cape Verde on a Transatlantic cruise. Today, we will be sightseeing on the island nation of about 600,000 people, but this new experience for us started over a week ago as we landed via airplane in Rio de Janeiro.

Our stay in Rio was our first trip to Brazil, and we made the most of our two days before boarding the Norwegian Star. Our first stop was atop the peak where the iconic statue of Jesus overlooks the city.

Of course, we visited the famous Ipanema Beach before boarding the ship for our trip across the Atlantic Ocean to Barcelona.

We rode a small tour bus to the top of a nearby mountain in Cape Verde. The ship overshadows everything else in the city. One of 10 islands, the country became independent from Portugal in 1975.

Due to my small Internet access package of about 20 minutes per day, I have to sign off for this week. Thanks to Anne for a challenge theme that fit our current travel so well.

The photos included here are minimally processed with my cell phone editor. Feel free to comment, I will read and respond when we return home in early April.

John Steiner