It’s springtime! Well, in some places it is. In other places it’s on the way. Spring brings fields of flowers, and with that a photography challenge. It’s nice to show the location of the flowers with a long view that shows the lay of the land. It’s also good to show the individual character of the flowers, rather than just a splotch of painted color. A way to accomplish both in one image is to make a spliced panorama of a close view and a distant view.

We’ve shown this technique before with several landscapes: Sedona, Dunes Beach, Yucca Plants The field of flowers opportunity is a way to cash in again. Hold the camera horizontally. Take one frame with the camera pointed to include a little sky, or at least the horizon, in the image. Then rotate the camera down until there is about one quarter of the frame overlapping with the first image. Take care not to bend over, or the images may not splice. Just rotate the camera in place. If you don’t get enough foreground, start with the camera a little closer to the ground for the first image.

The details of stitching are given in the Stitching Tutorial and embellished in the previously cited posts. I also use the trick of slightly increasing the contrast in the foreground of the image to increase the illusion of depth. That’s covered in the Contrast Adjustment Tutorial.

The first two of the following images were taken this past month at Filoli Gardens, in Woodside, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. The last image, taken earlier in the season, of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, is on the coast (lighthouse do tend to be on coasts) southwest of Woodside.

Tulips at Filoli Gardens

Daffodils at Filoli Gardens

Oxalis at Pigeon Point

If you haven’t tried out the vertical stitching technique, this Spring is a good time to start. It’s habit forming.