November 9, 2025November 3, 2025 photobyjohnbo

Cellpic Sunday—The Kauai Ukulele Festival

April 2025.
Lihue, Hawaii.

We first heard about the Kauai Ukulele Festival on April 12. We were fortunate: The annual event took place on Sunday, April 13. It was scheduled from 11 AM to 4 PM at the Kukui Grove Center in Lihue, Kauaʻi. Best of all, according to the description we found, it was a free event that celebrated “the cultural significance of the ʻukulele as Hawaiʻi’s ambassador of Aloha.”

We’d planned to shop in Lihue, so it made sense for us to stop by and see what was happening. We’d never been to the Kukui Grove Center, but we found it was conveniently close to Target and Costco, two of our regular grocery stops.

The festival stage was conveniently located in the food court area, and we thought it would be a good opportunity to have lunch while listening to some ukulele music. When we arrived, the bands were between sets, so we picked one of the several food vendors to order lunch and took our place in two of the very few empty seats in the court.

The festival lineup included a mix of well-known musicians and emerging artists, celebrating the cultural significance of the ukulele in Hawaiian music. Soon, it was time to introduce the next group in the lineup, Na Kani Leʻa, also known as The B3 Band. They were featured performers, and their set was scheduled for 1:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. A news article, here, noted that Na Kani Le’a features Joanne Parongao, and most of its members play ukuleles they created themselves with the help of Pololu Ukulele and Dr. Paul Arrington, a local physician and ukulele aficionado. The group also performs regularly in front of the Storybook Theatre during Friday Night Art in Hanapepe.

After the B3 Band, the Kapaʻa Middle School Ukulele Band performed. After their performance, our original goal of shopping beckoned, so we had to cut our festival experience short. You can find information here if you’d like to read more about the performers who were scheduled to appear.

About the photo: I captured several cell phone shots with my S23U featuring Na Kani Leʻa. After cropping in Adobe Lightroom Classic, I sent it off to Luminar Neo to use the Auto Adjust button in the Develop module, and lightly tweaked the Accent AI slider in the Enhance AI module. The Accent AI slider is nothing new for those who regularly read these “About” sections. If a photo doesn’t need noise reduction or sharpening, it’s often the only slider I tweak in Luminar Neo. I could dispense with Adobe Lightroom Classic altogether if I only did cell phone photos. Still, Lightroom keeps my catalogs of finished and unprocessed images, and it provides a ready link to Photoshop. I’ve also come to appreciate the masking features of Lightroom Classic for my day-to-night photos, as they are more sophisticated than those in Neo in many respects. For a closer look at the image in 2K HD or to view the photo’s metadata on my Flickr site, click on the image.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never assign a specific theme to this feature—the primary rule is that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or other mobile device. The second rule: link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post. Oh, and there’s no penalty if you don’t post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner