Panorama

Lookout Point – A Winter Panorama

While looking at some winter vacation pictures as I was eating my lunch today, I ran across several images I took at Grand Canyon last month. I stitched them together to form this panoramic image of the canyon seen from Lookout Point on the South Rim of Grand Canyon. Lookout Studio, with all the icicles, is on the right. Just left of center, you can see the tower atop the El Tovar Hotel. This is much different than summer conditions at the Canyon.

Click on the image and scroll to view this panorama full sized.

Lookout Panorama

A Winter Desert Panorama

The first day out on our recent winter cruise, we camped in the RV Resort in Twentynine Palms, California. When we woke up on Christmas Eve, we unhooked from the camp and headed into the Joshua Tree National Park north entrance.

It was a perfect day to see the park in wintertime. There were patches of snow here and there and the mountains surrounding the drive had a nice dusting of snow. At one point, we stopped at a scenic point where I took several images to later be stitched into a composite panorama.

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Image: Looking South and Southwest toward the Coachella Valley. Click 4 big.

We’re thinking about heading back to Twentynine Palms and back through the park in the springtime when the flowers will all be in bloom. The park was almost named “Wildflower,” but “Joshua Tree” won in the end.

Range Report

We had an interesting and fun time today at the range. At first, it was pretty busy, with most of the lanes occupied with shooters. Later, business seemed to taper off a bit with just us and one other booth occupied. I guess that folks were home watching wild card football playoffs or something.

I snapped three images of the sparsely occupied range and stitched them together to make this panoramic image. Because she moved between the second and third snapshots, Damsel appears to be two people. Click for full-size.

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Shooting was great today. We each shot about 100 rounds of .45s using the Glock 30 and the Warthog – which had NO misfeeds today. We also shot a couple of boxes of 9mm through the Glock 26 and S&W 908s. We even shot about 35 rounds of .38 special with Damsel’s S&W 686. To top it off, we shot 25 rounds each of 20 and 12 gauge with the Remington 870s.

We both agree it was a pretty good day of shooting.

Update: Thanks to Robb Allen for his link to this article.

Catalina Channel – 180° View

After a horrible three weeks on Wall Street and another demoralizing day today (especially for conservatives), I’m going to just say woooo saaaaah and divert my creativity to these nerdy panoramas. In the top image, on October 11th, I stood at Del Cerro Park near the top of San Pedro Hill on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and snapped eight separate images in sequence from left to right. I used the Canon Zoom Browser Photo Stitch utility to assemble this 180 degree view of the Catalina Channel on a nice clear day.

Channel Panorama

The second image is an experiment – The normal mode for panoramas is to center the horizon vertically in the image and pan the camera. I wanted to get a panorama of the coastline from Del Cerro and to get the foreground to blend into the picture as well. I am pretty pleased with the results I got. I took the series by trying to keep the horizon ‘horizontal’ in the viewfinder. I took six such images going from left to right. I had to post-process the pictures using a parallel scan setting on the stitch tool to get this ‘fish-eye’ sort of panoramic rendering. Both the foreground and the distance are rendered in perspective – just the effect I wanted to get.

Del Cerro Overlook

Click on either of these images to view them in the image viewer.

A Look Back to Catalina

Damsel took a lot of photos last Saturday when the air was exceptionally clear here in Southern California. We spent quite a lot of time shooting photos along the coastline, but when it came time to climb back over the hill to our side, we stopped at a scenic overlook and took this panoramic look back towards the coastline and Catalina Island in the distance. Click for the full-size panoramic image in the viewer.

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Canyonlands Panorama

These bizarre towers sculpted by nature are in South Canyonlands National Park. This canyon is the trailhead for the hike to the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, just about five miles from this Southern Utah location. At the far right extremity of this panorama, you can see the Damsel as she prepares to set up for her next photographic masterpiece.

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Click to view in the image viewer full-size.

Watching the Palin Speech

I’m busy enjoying Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the RNC. I didn’t think anything could top Fred’s speech last night, but Rudy’s giving it a go.

Meanwhile, while we will be watching Sarah Palin, you can enjoy this nice panoramic view of Damsel looking into Canyon de Chelly . . .

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Click to see the panorama full size.