Point Lobos is one of the world’s great scenic places. While the rocky shore and surf are reliable, sunshine there is not. We were lucky recently and had brilliant sun along with spring wild flowers. With all those things helping, it’s not too difficult take good pictures. We drove to the Bird Rock area, at the end of the short park road. To make photography a more interesting problem, add some kids running near the edge of the ocean bluff.

I wanted to include the ocean in the scene along with the kids. It’s nice to have a wave breaking, but the kids were not going to hold still until a choice wave came along. The solution is to make a spliced panorama. The kids were running, so the timing of that part of the scene was the most critical. I took that frame first. Waves, unlike children, recur periodically, so I could afford to wait until good surf broke. In principle, the water half of the panorama could be taken much later, so long as the clouds and lighting were the same.

Here are my two original frames.

The bottom frame was taken first.

The water’s edge barely visible in the bottom frame does not match the overlapping water in the top frame. That can be fixed by cropping out the water in the bottom frame or, sometimes cutting a part of the water from one frame and pasting it into the other. In this case, I did nothing and let Photoshop™ try splicing it. The photomerge™ technology does well in selecting hard edges to align; early splicing software by various vendors inevitably coughed and died when you tried to splice seascapes.

The spliced scene had too much contrast. You can see that problem coming in the original frames. I used the highlights/shadows adjustment in Photoshop to substantially darken the highlights.

Like most panoramas, it is much better viewed in a large version that shows the detail, here.

This panorama provides lots to look at: surf, rocks, sky, hills, wildflowers and kids. The kids also lend scale to the scene. The yellow flowers with red stems are bluff lettuce, an odd name given their appearance. The hillside had a dozen types of interesting wildflowers. I’m sure there is another blog post in that collection.