Great scenes fly by when you can’t stop to photograph them. Parking in the fast lane on an Interstate is ill-advised, even for a potentially masterful shot. Other times the situation is marginal. This May a nice scene presented itself when we were returning to the Lake Tahoe region in the California mountains from the pleasant town of Minden, Nevada. I pulled barely off the road and grabbed two frames out of the car window, and somehow managed to splice them into a respectable panorama.

I have quite a few pictures of parking lots. They are are an overlooked resource for photographers. Perhaps someday I’ll convince a publisher to put them out as a coffee table book, America’s Most Scenic Parking Lots. I shall be the Ansel Adams of parking lots. Yes, for sure. For now, however, I’m still building inventory, and the other day I took one in a parking lot in Coyote Hills Regional Park near San Francisco Bay. It had the potential for high drama, at least as parking lots go.

Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America. It spans the border between California and Nevada, southwest of Reno. One of the streams feeding the Lake forms Eagle Falls as it cascades into Emerald Bay on the California side. The top of the falls is only a few feet from the road, but I had driven by several times in the past without noticing it; waterfalls are not so exciting from the back. On a cold day in mid-May I took a two-frame panorama, looking towards Emerald Bay. The scene had interesting elements, but lacked punch. That is, until I unleashed the Topaz Labs Spicify Photoshop plug-in filter.

Silver Lake is a small lake in the mountains near better-known Mono Lake. The Lakes are east of Yosemite National Park in California, and as of last week the pass through Yosemite was still closed by snow. We drove south from Tahoe on the east side of the Sierras. Apparently not many people do that, because things were, shall we say, quiet. There were a few signs of early spring, but the aspen trees still had no leaves. It must be around 8,000 feet at Silver Lake, because aspens don’t grow at much lower altitudes.

Sometimes the world does not give you much to work with. It’s a good principle in travel sequences to include photos that show what it was like to be at the location. However, while large waves out in the ocean may be integral to the site, photos of distant waves lack drama … and just about every other aspect of photo appeal. One trick is to show tourists reacting to the attraction, rather than just the attraction itself.

I used to think of people as distractions to the landscape. Then I progressed to the point of valuing them as scale objects. There is nothing like a person near a redwood tree to show how big the tree is. Now I’m moving to the stage of believing that humans can actually add interest to scene. Maybe I’m not quite there yet, but I’m open to the idea. A case in point was a tourist who climbed out on a rock near Spanish Bay, Monterey, California and waved to her companions.

Spring flowers are slowly appearing on the California coast. On the beach near Monterey recently I found purple sand verbana. (There is also a yellow variety.) The purple variety it quite striking close up, but the flowers are so small it can be missed. Each flower in the cluster is about a quarter inch (6 mm) across. As the season progresses the flower becomes common in the sand along the coast.

Larger version “here”:http://quickshotartist.com/blog/images/250.jpg

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. The image breaks two rules of composition.

Photoshop™ has a number of built-in filters that attempt to convert photo images into artistic renditions. Previously I discussed posterization, sometimes followed by the palette knife filter, to punch up weak scenes. Recently I obtained some Photoshop filters from Topaz Labs, including the Topaz Simplify 2 filter set that includes a Painting option. My test cases were some photos of flowers that seemed to me to have potential, but needed punching up. I have come away a fan of the Topaz paint options.

Markleeville is the seat of Alpine County, a geographically large area having only about 1500 residents. The residents get to enjoy some of that eastern Sierra scenery. Markleeville is a small town (pop. 197) about 50 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe. Route 89 continues south of the town, ultimately turning east through Monitor Pass.

Roughly six miles south of Markleeville, the road crosses over the Carson River, providing an accessible photogenic view. The 4 PM late September sun provided contrasty lighting, just the thing for my recently recovered interest in high dynamic range imagery (HDRI). I took three frames, bracketed 1 1/2 stops around the nominal exposure, then added some extreme contrast enhancement to the foreground.