Point Reyes National Seashore is well known for scenery, wildflowers, and summer fog. The park is about an hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, either following California’s Highway 1 up the coast or winding through the hills west of the city of San Raphael. During a recent visit there were wildflowers, but not much sunshine. Hence the adjusted goal was to taken moody pictures of gumplant. I ended up merging four images into a wide angle view.

The guide book says that coast gumplant, rather than California gumplant, grows north of the Golden Gate Bridge, so that must be what I had to photograph. It’s called gumplant because the the plant oozes a sticky white fluid, particularly from the unopened flower buds. Native Americans used the gum to treat minor wounds. The flowers are bright yellow. Some say the crushed leaves smell like Juicy Fruit chewing gum, but, of course, I would never crush a leaf in national park.

It’s nice to show both the details of a plant and the area where it lives in the same photo. An area of Point Reyes called North Beach has the ocean, beach, bluffs, and gumplant waiting to be photographed. I was using a Nikon D80 SLR with an 18 – 70 mm macro zoom lens. An advantage over a pocket camera is that the macro lens will focus at short distances even when it is zoomed to a long focal length. Pocket cameras tend to only focus close up when the lens is at the widest angle.

18 mm corresponds to about 27 mm for the 35 mm camera equivalent, and that’s not enough to capture the flowers with all the scenic elements. Besides, I wanted to focus close up for the flowers and distant for the background. I took four frames in a 2 × 2 array to merge into a panorama.

Looking at the frames later on, I didn’t immediately recognize that they were all supposed to combine into one image. I made a vertical panorama from the two images on the right half of the scene, and then when I recognized the other two they wouldn’t merge well with the half that had been done. It was better to merge all four at once. Doing that in “reposition only” mode still had a small error, but merging in cylindrical mode worked well. Thanks to the projection the image does not appear distorted despite the wide angle.

The merge was cropped to a rectangle. I then selected the sky with the magic wand, adding the small pieces of sky under the fence rail with the shift key and magic wand to add the area. I darkened the selected sky using the Enhance > Lighting > Levels control. I added a little contrast overall, yielding:

click to enlarge

The yellow-flowered gumplant with pale leaves is intertwined with the reddish spikes of ice plant foliage.

The small image above does not show the gumplants well, which was an objective of the exercise. The image as produced in Photoshop is about 6600 × 4200 pixels. The actual pixels are shown in this snippet from the center of the image, about a third of the way up from the bottom. The white gum on the flower buds is evident.