Autumn is a time for visiting farm stands. There are pumpkins to be selected for Halloween, apples, and all manner of squash. So maybe not everyone thinks “panorama” at the farm stand, but, of course, I do. I like panoramic photos. Panoramas are well suited to scenes where there is a lot going on, as there was recently at Mike’s Truck Garden in Fulton, California.

Fulton is a small town off Highway 101, about an hour north of San Francisco. It’s in Sonoma County, near the Russian River. It’s rural, with vineyards the main feature of note, but nearby Sebastapol has become inseparably associated with gravenstein apples. There are dairies and other crops as well. These days farm stands may well include items from Chile along with the local produce.

A vertical panorama, with two horizontal images spliced one above the other, is a way to show those gravensteins at the farm stand.

The big picture, however, is a four image panorama. It shows what’s really going on, but maybe not so well when reduced from 9800 pixels wide to just 480 pixels:

A version about 1900 pixels wide is here. Yes, panoramic image do tend to have a plethora of pixels.

A detail shows actual pixels from the original full-sized image:

The main challenge with this panorama is the uneven exposure. I let the camera autoexpose each of the four frames, and then let Photoshop™ make the transitions smooth as it spliced the images. I then lightened the shadows. The apples on the left were overexposed, but I could do nothing to fix that. A high dynamic range panorama would have been better, but, hey, I was working under pressure with a pocket camera.

I also used the Filter > Correct Camera Distortion feature of Photoshop to set the verticals parallel to the edge of the frame.

Farm stands over opportunities for close-ups as well. For example, how about a memorable bin of squash?

Farm stands provide a total photographic experience. And you also get stuff to eat.