Cellpic Sunday – Facts, Fictions & Fantasies

Cellpic Sunday — Ring-a-Ding

March 1, 2026March 1, 2026Fandango6 Comments

John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday, in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. He encourages us to participate in this cellphone photo prompt by creating our own CellPic Sunday post and linking it back to his post.

As most of you know, I moved into my new home on Friday and my wife and I still have a long way to go to unpack all of the boxes and put things where they belong and then to retrain our brains to remember where everything is.

Anyway, after spending a close to sleepless night on Friday, at some point maybe an hour or so after sunrise yesterday, I opened up my Ring doorbell app on my iPhone and saw something that made me say “Wow” because of the geometric interest, at least to me, of what I saw. So I took a screen shot of the Ring doorbell image on my phone.

Our new house faces east, so the early morning rising sun created some fascinating shadows of the wooden fence we have on our front porch. And I thought it interesting enough to share it with all of you, my WordPress friends, today on John’s Cellpic Sunday.

And speaking about my WordPress friends and my move, I haven’t had much time since Wednesday, actually, to be on WordPress. I have hardly posted anything other than my previously scheduled daily FOWC word prompts. Nor have I had a chance to read or comment on any of your posts.

So I am sorry I have been MIA and will continue to be for maybe a week more. But hopefully I will be back to full throttle by next week.

Cellpic Sunday — White Onions

September 28, 2025September 28, 2025Fandango9 Comments

I had to go all the way to my kitchen counter for this shot. My wife was making a batch of Chili for us and I ordered the necessary ingredients from our local grocery store for delivery to our door. Part of my order was two organic yellow onions. But when the items were delivered, these are the onions we received:

Do they look yellow to you? No, they don’t. Because they are white onions. I took this picture and sent it to the grocery store and asked for a refund, which they gave. Fortunately, my wife had two yellow onions in the cabinet. So she was able to make the chili despite the grocery store’s error. And it was delicious.

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Clouds

September 21, 2025Fandango10 Comments

Like John, I visit some exotic sights, and the photo I’m sharing with you today was taken in one of the most exotic places on Earth: my backyard.

I took this photo at 7:00 pm this past Wednesday evening. I was taking our dog out for her after-dinner business trip around the backyard when I looked up at the sky. This is what I saw:

I thought, Wow, what interesting clouds those are in the evening sky. I need to share this with my blog friends this coming Sunday. And here we are, on Sunday. I do hope you find this photo as interesting as I do.

Anyway, that’s it. Enjoy what is left of your weekend.

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Three Wild Turkeys

September 7, 2025September 7, 2025Fandango5 Comments

Today John shared a photo and a story about a luau he and his family attended on a trip to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. My share today takes place at another exotic location beyond the deer wire fence in my backyard.

There is a steep drop-off behind my yard to the house behind ours, and we’ve seen all kinds of critters there, from deer to skunks to coyotes. But the other day, we had these three visitors who were grazing on the hill.

Our dog saw them on the other side of the fence. She was barking wildly and running back and forth along the fence line. But these three wild turkeys were nonplussed, ignoring the barking and the running dog entirely. Turkeys are alleged to be dumb birds, but these three seemed to know that a five-foot-tall wire fence protected them from a crazy dog.

Last week I used a new feature in Google Photos to create a brief animation of my cellpic of my cat. Just for giggles, I decided to do it again with my turkey photo. It’s fun.

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Cat Behind the Curtain

September 1, 2025August 31, 2025Fandango11 Comments

I know I am late with my Cellpic Sunday post since it’s Monday. I wasn’t going to participate this week because I couldn’t find anything interesting until last night when I found this photo from August 15, 2015 in my archives.

Apparently my cat had crawled between a curtain and the sliding glass door that led to a deck. It was nighttime and the deck lights were on and his silhouette showed up on the curtain. I thought it was cool.

I recently discovered a new AI tool in Google Photos that can be used to add a brief animation to still photos. So I decided to give it a try and here is what it created.

Pretty cool, huh?

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Arches and Dead Horses

August 17, 2025August 17, 2025Fandango8 Comments

As I don’t have any recent cellpic photos that I’d classify as interesting, unusual, exotic, or erotic, I engaged the Wayback Machine to August 16, 2013.

On one of our cross country drives, one of the sites my wife and I wanted to check out was Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah. Arches National Park has the largest density of natural sandstone arches in the world. It is spectacular. Here are four photos taken in the early afternoon at Arches. The last one is called “The Three Sisters.” I wonder why.

At the hotel we stayed at in Moab, one of the other guests suggested we check out Dead Horse Point State Park, which is not far from Arches National Park. So we did.

Dead Horse Point State Park, is essentially a 2,000-foot mesa overlooking the Colorado River. So after visiting Arches, we headed over to Dead Horse and these next four photos are from Dead Horse Point State Park at around 6:30 pm.

By the way, Arches National got its name due to the many sandstone arches at the park. Duh! But aren’t you curious about how Dead Horse Point State Park got its name? Of course you are.

It’s a sad story, actually. According to legend, the park is so named because the point was used as a corral for wild mustangs roaming the mesa top. Cowboys rounded up these horses, herded them across the narrow neck of land and onto the point. The neck, which is only 30-yards-wide, was then fenced off with branches and brush. This created a natural corral surrounded by precipitous cliffs straight down on all sides, affording no escape. Cowboys then chose the horses they wanted and let the others go free. One time, for some unknown reason, horses were left corralled on the waterless point where they died of thirst within view of the Colorado River, 2,000 feet below.

Sorry to end this on such a sad note, but hey, life ain’t always butterflies and waterfalls, you know what I mean?

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Illumination

August 10, 2025August 10, 2025Fandango15 Comments

It’s been a few weeks since I last participated in Cellpic Sunday because I really haven’t taken too many blogworthy pictures recently. And I’m not sure I have one today either. But I’m going to post it nonetheless.

One of my ambitions is to get a decent photo of the moon after dark with my iPhone. And then other night, there was almost a full moon hanging low in the sky at around 8:45 pm. So I stepped out onto my backyard deck and snapped this picture.

There is the moon in the upper left of the photo looking like the moon in most of my iPhone photos: like the beam from a flashlight shining down out of the sky. No definition, no-man-in-the-moon. Just a whiteish-yellowish ball suspended in the air. What a disappointment.

But something interesting happened just as I snapped the picture. The lights on our waterfall, which are on a dark-to-dawn timer, popped on. The instant before I snapped this photo, the waterfall was dark and would have been virtually invisible in the photo.

I “zoomed in” (via the magic of cropping) to give a better view of the illuminated waterfall.

So I may not have gotten a great moon shot, but I was pleased with the waterfall shot.

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Literal Reflections

July 27, 2025July 27, 2025Fandango6 Comments

If you see the photo above and think that the subject of the photo is a potted Bird of Paradise plant in a dark gray, geometric-shaped planter, you’d be wrong. I took this photo today at around 2:00 pm while I was sitting in a swing chair hanging from a pergola at the far end of our backyard deck. It was a beautiful day, mid 70s, sunny, with only the slightest breeze.

What you should focus on when looking at this photo is the reflection in the glass sliding door behind the plant. If you look closely behind and just above the plant, you’ll see my reflection, sitting in the swing chair, holding up my iPhone to my face, and taking the photo. [This is about the closest thing you’ll get to a selfie of me on my blog.] Our dog is lying on the deck next to me looking back at the glass slider waiting for my wife to come out and join us.

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Now You See It, Now You Don’t

June 22, 2025June 22, 2025Fandango11 Comments

The photo below shows a big pine tree — a Deodar cedar to be precise — in our front yard. It’s old and it’s leaning toward our home and it has already dropped some large, dead branches that have fallen off during some heavy winds and came perilously close to falling on our house. Additionally, our front yard is full of pine needles and sap, making it unwelcoming for our dog. So my wife and I decided to take down the old pine tree and eventually replace it with, perhaps, a maple.

The day came for the tree to be removed and I put a chair in our backyard and periodically snapped photos of the progress of the tree removal. This first shot was take. At 10:00 am, just before the crew got to work on the tree.

This second shot was taken about an hour and a half later as they were cutting off the lower branches.

These guys worked fast and by 1:30 in the afternoon all of the branches were removed and the top of the trunk was already down.

And by 2:45, the tree was fully removed except for the stump, and it took almost as long to grind down the stump as it did to take down the whole tall tree.

Now my wife and I need to go shopping g for a nice, healthy maple tree to replace that big old pine tree in our front yard.

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

Cellpic Sunday — Escape from Alcatraz

June 8, 2025June 8, 2025Fandango6 Comments

It’s been about a month since I last responded to John’s Cellpic Sunday prompt because, truth be told, I haven’t been anywhere or done anything worthy of posting any cellpics.

But four days ago I reached back into my archives for Kate’s One-to-Three Photo Processing Challenge and posted a six year old photo of being in a boat speeding away from Alcatraz Island.

I figure that most of you have heard of Alcatraz, especially now that Trump has decided he wants to reopen it. Alcatraz, the former federal prison located on a small island in the middle of San Francisco Bay closed in 1963. It is now a tourist attractions that is managed by the National Park Service and attracts more than a million and a half visitors annually.

It’s been in the news lately because the looney in the Oval Office wants to reopen and significantly expand Alcatraz Island as a “maximum-security prison to house America’s most dangerous and violent offenders.”

Anyway, I took a few snaps near and at Alcatraz when my wife had some out-of-town guest visited us in October 2019. I decided, since many of you may never have visited Alcatraz and might wonder about it, to share a few photos from that day.