… but I sure can’t figure out how to share it here in any reasonable way. :-)

I was at Pacheco State Park (California) this morning, and I made it up onto a ridgetop with a view all the way across the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada range. Having the big lens with me I decided to make a multi-shot panorama of the scene, and I ended up with a photograph consisting of eight 12 megapixel full frame images. It includes parts of the Pacheco Pass area of the Diablo Range, San Luis Reservoir, the width of the Central Valley, and a good long chuck of the Sierra.

This thing is huge: printed 16 inches tall it would be about 100 inches wide, and it would be close to 10 feet wide if printed 18 inches tall! I made a 1000 pixel-wide version, hoping to post it here, but even that size is too small in the vertical dimension. Hmmm… what to do?

I was at the coast yesterday for a few hours, and I ended up photographing windsurfers. I found a (very windy!) spot just above the surf a a beach a bit north of Davenport and set up with the long lens and a tripod… and proceeded to make a few hundred exposures. Some of the better images are now in the queue to appear here a few weeks from now – some of them are already posted in my Flickr Gallery. (There is a link in the sidebar.)

For someone who shoots more landscape images than anything else, photographing sports (and other active subjects like birds in flight) is actually a good exercise on several counts. While I’ve pointed out before that landscape photography isn’t always as sedate as some might imagine (lighting, clouds, etc. can change very fast), in general there is a lot more time to carefully consider things, and you do frequently get second chances. Not so with these subjects. You have to think fast – the subject is moving, the camera must track the subject (and lock AF), momentary juxtapositions appear and are gone, lighting can be tricky, and you somehow have to think about composition in a very dynamic way. All good practice, I think.

I know the calendar says otherwise, but spring is here! (I also realize that the photos that are coming up in the queue here are not terribly spring-like, but hang in there…)

The California hills are turning green for real now. While I saw hints earlier, today’s hike confirmed it: grass is coming up, trees are budding, and the wildflower show is just getting started. (I posted a photo from this morning’s hike at one of my other blogs.)