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Cellpic Sunday—Smith’s Lū‘au Sharing the Aloha Spirit

Smith’s Lū‘au.

April 2025.
Līhu‘e, Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i.

Smith’s Lū‘au is in Wailua Marina State Park, on Kaua‘i’s east coast, just north of Līhu‘e. The lū‘au has been a tradition celebrating Hawaiian culture for over 50 years. Walter Smith, Sr., and his wife Emily started their company on the Wailua River with a small rowboat and a borrowed outboard motor. Over time, the company expanded to include the Fern Grotto Wailua River Cruise and a 30-acre botanical and cultural garden known as Smith’s Tropical Paradise. In future posts, I will feature more photos from the lū‘au, a visit to Fern Grotto, and the botanical garden.

Lynn and I attended the lū‘au show with our daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. We didn’t get to participate in the lū‘au meal because we only started looking for lū‘aus in the area about a week in advance. All lū‘aus held while the family was visiting were sold out by then. Some lū‘aus will sell tickets to the show only if the lū‘au meal is full and there is still show space available. That’s what happened in our case. If you plan to visit a lū‘au and want the full experience, be sure to make your reservation well in advance.

About the photo: This photo presents the typical challenges of shooting pictures from the upper levels of a theater. As a person of shorter stature, it’s only a matter of luck for me to be seated behind shorter people to give me a clear view of the stage. As it turned out, I was lucky to have only a couple of people blocking the very bottom of the stage from my camera. I used my Samsung S23U in 10X (Ultra Rear Telephoto) mode, cropped the image to focus on the stage, and then opened it in Photoshop 2025 to remove the distracting backlit heads. I didn’t even use the generative fill mode to do so.

Smith's Luau heads crop
Crop of the right corner showing backlit audience heads.

There is a reflecting pool in front of the stage, so my first action was to crop the photo to eliminate that pool and with it, the bottom parts of the two heads.

Generative fill isn’t the only tool for removing objects in Photoshop. I used the Remove Distractions option to highlight the remaining head shadows. It did a pretty good job, but the two flame lights on the far right weren’t rendered correctly, and the stage corner had an unnatural shadow in the extreme-right corner. I sent the image back to Adobe Lightroom Classic to continue editing.

To fix the shadow in the right corner, I used the Clone tool to repair the stage corner by selecting another part of the stage just above the shadow and duplicating those pixels into the shadowed area. Fortunately, the dancers’ shadows were at an angle that didn’t cause a problem for the edit. I opted not to try to duplicate the other stage lights to replace the ones created in Photoshop, as I didn’t think the two flames would be noticeably different to the casual viewer on a web page. I thought I might be borrowing a lot of trouble as those two lights blocked a dancer’s foot, and the fix might be more of a problem than the fault. Even in photo editing, you have to pick your battles. You can click on the image at the top to pixel-peep in 2K HD and examine the photo’s metadata on my Flickr site.

I invite fellow bloggers to join in by creating their own Cellpic Sunday posts. There’s no set theme. The first rule is that your photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or other mobile device. The second rule is simple: link your challenge response to this post or drop a comment here with your link so others can find it. And remember, despite the name, there’s no penalty for sharing on a day other than Sunday.

John Steiner

31 comments

  10. You brought back memories of my last visit to Kauai John. Fortunately, we did experience the dinner along with the show. But my camera and cell phone at the time weren’t up to getting good pictures. That was one reason I bought my Fuji. Well done!

    Reply

  20. […] This pic was taken at Spirit Halloween, with my Samsung A32. I cropped the image slightly to remove the background customers and resize it to take up less space in my media folder. Posted for Johnbo’s Cellpic Sunday challenge. […]

    Reply

  21. What an interesting event a luau sounds to be from your explanation 🙂. I wish I get to experience it at least once sometime 🙂.

    Reply

  22. Shows like that are always a lighting challenge to take – even without heads! LOL. It looks like you are having lots of fun. I love Kauai. Their luaus are the best, so I’ve heard. We’ve only been to one there. Thanks again for all your help. It’s good to be back in business. 🙂

    Reply

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