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Cellpic Sunday – The Sidney Lanier Bridge Connects the Golden Isles

Sidney Lanier Bridge.

Jekyll Island, Georgia.

Regular readers of this humble blog know of my penchant for featuring photos of bridges. As we traveled through Georgia, we found ourselves on the Jekyll Island Causeway, the only connection for cars to travel from the Georgia mainland to Jekyll Island. The causeway spans the marshes of Glynn County, crossing over Jekyll Creek. We stopped at the Jekyll Island Visitor Center along the way and got a close-up view of the marshes. I noticed a cable-stayed bridge in the distance. Knowing I would need to share that photo, I used my cell phone to capture the GPS coordinates of the camera phone so I could quickly identify the bridge.

Google provided the background information on the design details of this beautiful bridge. The Sidney Lanier Bridge is a vital transportation link spanning the Brunswick River. It connects the city of Brunswick to the Golden Isles, carrying U.S. Route 17 and significantly improving traffic flow compared to its predecessor, a 1956 vertical-lift bridge.

Named after Georgia’s renowned poet, Sidney Lanier, who celebrated the beauty of the surrounding marshes, the bridge’s design reflects this connection to nature and artistry. Completed in 2003, this impressive structure is both the tallest and longest bridge in Georgia. It features two prominent H-shaped pylons that rise 486 feet (148 m) above the river. These pylons anchor the stay cables supporting the bridge deck, creating a structurally efficient design.

About the photo: I captured the scene with my Samsung S23U, and the processing in Lightroom and Luminar Neo took only a few minutes. For those who use Luminar Neo’s Enhanced AI tool, the sky often takes on an oversaturated blue, especially when the clouds take on a blue tone. Depending upon the specifics in the photo, I either mask out the sky and have the Enhanced AI tool only work on the landscape, or after running Enhanced AI on the entire image, I mask the sky and reduce the color saturation only in the sky, giving the clouds a more natural gray tone. Either method works, but I used the latter method in this case. You can click on the image above to see it 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 also acceptable. 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, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner

32 comments

  18. That’s a lot of marsh. I remember going through marshes for the first time on a train. We were practically eye level to the marshes, and we went about 20 miles an hour because the tracks were in such bad shape. My hands were knotted in my lap until we left the marsh. This looks like a much safer way to cross over that terrain.

    Reply

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