We had an unusually warm day recently, and when that happens in California one tries to head for the coast. We headed for the Monterey area, about two hours south of San Francisco. In the town of Moss Landing, we spotted a sign for Zmudowski State Beach. A long road zig-zagging through strawberry fields brought us to an expanse of fine sand, dunes, and wildflowers. It was 75 at the beach, 95 inland.

Per my usual modus operandi, I found a view that I thought would make a nice vertical panorama, and took these two frames:

They stitched up in Photoshop™ to produce

It seemed like a good idea, by it did not turn out well. I wanted to feature the red flowers in the distance, so I has zoomed out 4X. The panoramic stitching was then supposed to get back some of the field-of-view, enough to include the yellow flowers in the foreground. But telephotos do not like to focus closeup, so the yellow flowers are out of focus. Moreover, the yellow blobs are a distraction from the red flowers I wanted to feature. Had they been in focus, it still wouldn’t have worked.

Plan B is was forget the panorama and instead crop in to the red flowers. In Photoshop I selected the sky, feathered the selection, and darken the sky by 25%. I reset the black point with Levels. (Click the image to enlarge it. As with most highly detailed photos, it is best viewed enlarged.)

I’m not sure the crop I selected was the best. Another possibility was to crop the panorama so that just a few of the yellow flowers, ones mostly in focus, were included. Another possibility is to crop the top frame even more tightly:

I included a green patch on the lower right to balance the blue sky on the upper left.

Many California place names reflect the heritage of Spanish mission settlements. I don’t know whether or not there was a Mission Zmudowski, but it a splendid place nonetheless.