Napa Valley, above the north end of San Francisco Bay, is California’s best-known wine producing region. Every year in February and March they hold a Mustard Festival coincident with the blooming of mustard planted in the vineyards to keep the weeds down. It picks up the late-winter tourist slump. Part of the festival is a photography contest. It’s a worthy challenge to try to do something new with fields of yellow flowers.

It’s too early for most of the mustard flowers, but we traveled to Napa this week to see how things were progressing. I wanted to make the best of a partly cloudy sky, so I took two frames for a spliced panorama. If the sky and the ground are in a single frame, the sky is usually overexposed and and the ground underexposed. With two images, the camera exposure adjusts separately for the sky and ground.

Before attempting to splice the images, I cropped the ground image just above the horizon. That minimizes the overexposure near the horizon. I also darkened the lower image a little to better match the sky image. After splicing, I increased the contrast and tweaked the levels.

The image breaks two rules of composition. The horizon is close to the center of the image, rather than close to one-third or two-thirds of the way to the top. Also, the image is more nearly square than most landscapes. I tried various ways of cropping to try to cure these defects, but nothing suited as well as the original. I suspect some rule is overriding the one-third two-thirds rule. I’m just not smart enough to know what that rule is.

We did find a field in which the mustard flowers were well along. This image shows what is in store. It has an interesting defect that’s not obvious on a web-sized image, but see if you can spot it:

From near to far, the image starts in focus, goes out of focus, comes back in focus, then goes out of focus again. It was spliced from two moderate-telephoto images, and the depth-of-field was exceeded in each. It won’t win any contests.