Saint John, New Brunswick.

A placard near this lamp post notes that the lamp, then a single oil lamp, was placed as a navigation aid in 1842. Vessel captains could line up the light with the Trinity Church spire to navigate safely into the harbor at night. Eventually, the lamp was replaced with three gas-powered lights, red panels facing the sea, and white panels facing the land. Of course, modern navigation tools have long since replaced the need for lamps.

At some point, lost in history, locals started calling the lamps the Three Sisters. Some say the term is a reference to maritime navigation using the constellation Orion whose belt consists of three stars often referred to as the Three Sisters. Some say the reference is more modern, coined by a local radio host, and the term caught on with the locals. Some say it is a reference to folklore, the three sisters waited on that spot for their husbands to return from the sea. Their story is one of tragedy, love, and the enduring spirit of sisterhood.

As fate would have it, tragedy struck when a powerful storm swept across the bay, claiming the lives of many sailors, including the husbands of the three sisters. In their grief, the three sisters sought solace in their shared pain and love for one another. Determined to honor the memory of their lost loves, they decided to dedicate their lives to the sea that had taken their partners away.

As the years passed, the sisters became known as the Three Sisters of Saint John, symbols of strength, resilience, and unwavering love. Their legend grew, inspiring generations of Saint John residents to embrace the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

About the photo: A couple of weeks ago, I saw a YouTube video about a Photoshop process to create some fine art images. I subscribe to Lightroom and Photoshop, but it’s mostly to get access to Lightroom. Despite my lack of expertise, I decided to try to get Photoshop to do what I wanted, but it was a real challenge, even with the help of the video as recent updates to P/S didn’t quite match the video anymore. I got the job done and learned a bit along the way. That post was published a month or so ago.

As it turned out, I found I could use the same P/S method to give this image a soft-focus background. The image was shot with an f/1.8 lens opening. [edit: After a comment from Philo, noting the lack of background blur for a typical f/1.8 image, I admitted to the same misgivings. In reviewing my collection of images from my Samsung S20U, it appears the camera always reported f/1.8 in the metadata. So, I can’t say for sure what the true f/stop is for this image.] The background objects, that cruise ship and apartment building were in sharp focus. I tried my usual process in Lightroom and Luminar Neo to de-emphasize the background but I wasn’t happy, so then I got the idea to use the process I’d just learned in Photoshop. After basic edits in Lightroom, I sent the image to Photoshop where I used the Subject mask to put the lamp on a separate layer and hid the layer. I then used Context Aware to remove the lamp from the background image. Finally, I used the Blur>Lens blur tool to defocus the background. When I turned the lamp layer back on, I was done. With the image posted to Flickr and to the top of this post, all I had left to do was tell the story.

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

Yes, I know, we missed an opportunity. Saint John is surrounded by natural beauty, thanks to its location on the Bay of Fundy. The bay is known for having the highest tides in the world, resulting in dramatic changes in water levels throughout the day. Views of the changing tides are popular at the Bay of Fundy, but the excursion times were long, a couple over seven hours. We tend to limit our excursions to five hours generally and therefore made the decision to walk the part of the city known as “Uptown.” The historic area is a short walk from where we were docked at the Diamond Jubilee Cruise Terminal located at the mouth of the Saint John River. But I am getting ahead of myself in the photo story.

Of course, a lighthouse attracted my attention on this cloudy morning. Coming into the harbor we passed the Courtenay Bay Breakwater Lighthouse at the far end of the breakwater that protects the seaport.

From the balcony of our ship, I saw a Celtic Cross. I learned in my visit to the monument that the cross was erected in 1997 by descendants of the Irish settlers and is a half-scale replica of a cross erected in 1927 that stands on Partridge Island in Saint John Harbor. That cross replaced a wooden cross that stood in the cemetery on the island since 1847.

The text engraved on the cross notes in part, THIS MONUMENT WAS ERECTED IN MEMORY OF MORE THAN 2000 IRISH IMMIGRANTS WHO DIED OF TYPHUS FEVER CONTRACTED ON SHIPBOARD DURING THE VOYAGE FROM IRELAND IN THE FAMINE YEAR 1847 AND OF WHOM 600 WERE BURIED IN THIS ISLAND.

The text also commemorates the devotion and sacrifice of Dr. James Patrick Collins who emigrated to Saint John in 1837 and soon began an internship with a prominent local physician. At the start of the epidemic, Dr. Collins played a prominent role in combating the disease but in less than a month he contracted the disease and only a week later he died.

A short walk from the Celtic Cross is the Three Sisters Lamp. The story of the lamp and its history in Saint John is featured in the next Cellpic Sunday. Coincidentally, the Norwegian Joy docked just ahead of our ship earlier that morning. It was in the background when I captured the photo of the Three Sisters. I had fun reprocessing this photo to blur the background and I documented the method I used in Sunday’s post.

The Joy was docked directly behind a container village. About forty businesses are housed in shipping containers. I haven’t ever seen one of these before. Two containers stacked one upon the other serve as a single business. Generally, the lower container contains the retail store, tour company, or other vendor. The container above is apparently used as an office or warehouse for the store below, though none were open to view and confirm.

The fronts of the lower container were cut open with supporting doorways in such a way as to act as storefronts for the business. There was even one container stack in a fenced area reserved for crew members on shore break to relax and have a drink or a snack. Admission to the fenced-off area is via a valid crew member ID. The village is open Wednesday through Sunday and whenever a cruise ship is in port.

We headed up Prince William Street toward The City Market, one of the oldest continuously operating farmers’ markets in North America. Only about a 10-minute walk from the docks, the market is popular with visitors and it is home to over 100 vendors selling a wide variety of local produce, meats, seafood, baked goods, crafts, and other goods. Given the fact that we are limited to food products that can be brought back on the ship, be cautious about what food products you might purchase there unless it is for immediate consumption.

The city’s Uptown area features well-preserved Victorian-era architecture, including the colorful row houses of the Trinity Royal Heritage Conservation Area. As we walked up Prince William Street, we passed by several of these beautiful old homes.

After our short walk about the city, we were back on the ship before noon and enjoyed a relaxing afternoon on the deck, cold drinks in hand, and played a game of Mexican Train using the domino set we brought along. Eventually, we noticed we were under power as the ship sidestepped away from the dock.

As we got far enough away from the dock, using the side thrusters, the captain and port pilot executed a 180-degree rotation of the ship so we could head forward out of the harbor. That maneuver gave me a full view of the Joy still sitting next to the dock.

As we exited the harbor, we passed Partridge Point and the Partridge Island Lighthouse. There was still plenty of daylight, but the lighthouse was operating. Now operated by the Canadian Coast Guard, the navigation aid is no longer used to guide ships, but it is a popular tourist destination. Visitors can take a ferry to the island and climb the lighthouse for stunning views of the harbor. We’ll save that ferry ride for our next visit to Saint John.

I captured a few images of the light’s flare when it rotated so the light pointed directly at me. Of course, I couldn’t just leave the image alone, I used Luminar Neo’s radial mask and Sunray tools to emphasize the light beams. Then I created a low-key image by simply lowering the exposure in Lightroom. For this image, the lens was set to 52 mm. On my Flickr site, I also provide this image with the correct exposure for you if you are interested in seeing the “true” amount of daylight as we exited the harbor.

I also captured a view of the lighthouse with my zoom lens set to 185 mm. I decided to use DxO’s Silver Efex 2 to process it into black-and-white. You can view the entire gallery of images in 2K HD on my Flickr site in the album here.

As we sailed away, I came to two conclusions, first that Saint John offers a combination of historical charm, natural beauty, and a thriving urban center. Secondly, I came to regret our original decision to bypass the Bay of Fundy, but that gives us an excuse to plan a future visit.

John Steiner

Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

We stopped at Saint John on our Canadian cruise out of New York in September 2022. Our goal for our one-day visit was simply to walk around the city near the dock where the Carnival Magic tied down for the day.

The Saint John Cruise Port is one of the primary ports of call for cruise ships visiting the Bay of Fundy region. The port can accommodate large vessels and offers a range of facilities and services for cruise passengers. For cruisers who do not even wish to walk uptown, there is a container village featuring souvenir shops and other typical vendors of cruise products, tour companies, and even a lounge only open to cruise ship employees who want to spend some of their free time off the ship.

About the photo: Upon leaving the ship, we walked over to Water Street and I saw an opportunity to capture the Carnival Magic in a two-image panoramic photograph. The ship is home to about 1400 crew members who service the needs of around 3700 passengers, typically.

I brought the two images, bow and stern each 12,000 by 9,000 pixels, into Adobe Lightroom’s panoramic stitcher and then reduced the panorama’s size to 4096 pixels wide before I shipped the combined image off to Luminar Neo. Loading super large images into Neo for processing can take a very long time to do basic processing tasks that would be wasted on the resolution of a typical blog post.

The weather was mostly overcast and the sky really didn’t complement the image so I experimented with sky replacement. As we arrived early in the morning, I found a sky from Luminar’s collection that reflected the appropriate time of day for us to leave the ship. The dock is oriented mostly north and south so with the ship pointed in a northwesterly direction, the clouds would be lit from the left rear of the ship with the light stronger at the stern. The angle of the sun in the sky I chose didn’t match the orientation of the ship so I used the “flip” option in the sky replacement tool. That moved the angle of the sun toward the rear of the ship.

If you look at the original version, you can see that the eastern side of the taller section of the cruise terminal appears to be properly lit by the sun but the upper level of the tallest section appears to be a bit in the shade of a cloud. In the modified image, I used the brush mask to first raise the exposure to the upper section of that tall eastern wall to match the lower part of the wall. Then I masked the entire wall of that section and raised the exposure a bit more to emphasize the sunlit wall. Taking care of small details with shadows and sunlight angles when using sky replacement makes the final image realistic and believable. I used Neo’s Golden Hour slider to give the plants in the foreground a bit of early morning color. Were you able to tell immediately that something wasn’t quite right in the sky or the lighting? Which version of the image do you prefer? Let me know what you think in the comments. For a closer look at the images, click on either one above to view them on my Flickr site in 2K HD.

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