Cellpic Sunday – 12 December 2021

Florence, Oregon.

U.S. Highway 101 is one of the premier scenic drives in the United States. It runs from southern California to Washington, much of the way along the Pacific coast. When I was a youngster in school in Long Beach, California, I learned that the highway is also known as El Camino Real (Spanish for the royal road, or the king’s highway.)

In southern California, that name was derived from the fact that it loosely followed the trails between Catholic missions that were about a day’s walk between them. However, once you get to the more northerly portions of the highway, it loses the name, though it could still be considered a royal road with views fit for a king.

Near the Heceta Head Lighthouse, there is a sign that will take you off the highway. The Heceta Head State Scenic Viewpoint in Oregon is a worthy stop. You will wind down a small access road to a parking lot. There is a fee for parking there, but the view of the beach is worth the $5 USD. If you feel like a bit of a hike, you can take a trail to the lighthouse.

About the photo: The parking lot was relatively full and there were lots of people on the beach with an unknown number surely walking the trail to the lighthouse. I noticed that the waves occasionally crashed high on the rocky coastline near two giant rock outcroppings. I waited patiently for a large group of people to move out of the range of my camera, and then waited some more to attempt to capture the wave crashing higher than usual. There were now only two people in the foreground, just enough to help show the scale of the image.

I didn’t have to wait too long, and the normal lag of my S20U Samsung in 108MP mode requires a bit of a premonition as to exactly when to push the button. Any other mode in the camera doesn’t display any lag, but capturing a 12,000×9,000 pixel image creates a slight delay that I’m quite used to dealing with. Once I downloaded the image into Lightroom, I added some contrast and clarity, then shipped it off to Luminar AI where I used the Sky AI to bring out the details in the clouds. To view the image in 2K HD and peep at the metadata, click on the image to view details on 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.

John Steiner