Cellpic Sunday – 1 August 2021

White Horse Hill National Wildlife Preserve, North Dakota.

A couple of weeks ago, I featured an image captured from the top of White Horse Hill and provided some background on the preserve and its location on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation. This week’s image features the view of Devils Lake from the top of the hill. The top of the hill is at 1608 feet (489 m) and the lake altitude is variously quoted on the Internet, but the consensus appears to be 1447 feet (441 m). The lake is North Dakota’s largest natural lake and in recent years has been growing in size.

The route from the parking area to the top of the hill, however, seems much higher than it is because the hill is steep near the top. Steep enough, in fact, that they installed 93 embedded wooden steps, handrails and even landing areas with resting benches along the path to the top.

About the photo: Captured with my Samsung S20U, this image is actually two cellpics merged into a single panoramic view. I used Adobe Lightroom to create the panorama and then exported the resulting image into Luminar AI for final processing. The final image and its metadata can be viewed in 2K HD detail on my Flickr site by clicking on the photo above.

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, 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.

John Steiner

20 comments

  1. Absolutely beautiful picture! I recently got a new cell phone, and your images will motivate me to go out and use its camera. My old phone was a freebie from AT&T when they forced everyone to get on their wireless system.

    • Thanks for sharing your post as a Cellpic Sunday challenge. I hope you’ll stop by again.

      My wife has a Galaxy S10+ as her primary camera for family and social media sharing. It does a wonderful job for her.

    • I use both the panoramic and merge tools in Lightroom a lot. I really like a super-wide image, so sometimes I go overboard.
      I find the automated tools built into most cameras can leave distortion and other artifacts when building a panoramic image. Lightroom does it better, usually.

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