This is what a drought looks like folks

This morning I was all set to walk along the San Gabriel River.  A lovely stroll along the river is what I envisioned.  Didn't happen.  The Azusa River Wildnerness Park in Azusa was closed because of mudslides 2 weeks ago, and to add insult to injury it was a high fire danger day so they didn't want us anywhere near the brush.

But I did take a drive into the canyons along the river today.  I was absolutely gobsmacked by how low the waters was at the dams.  One day in particular, the San Gabriel Dam, an earthen dam, was so empty all that was left was muck, flotsam and jetsam and general debris in the bottom.

For those of you not in the Los Angeles Area, or California, you probably aren't aware that we are in a severe drought.  Its been several years since we've had "normal" rainfall and our dams are really showing it.  This year we are down something along the order of 2/3 of "normal" rainfall which explains the pathetic condition of these dams.Doesn't bode well for us down the hill that rely on this water to recharge our aquifers.

I'll try next week to take a walk along the river in the Azusa River Wildnerness Park.  Again

These images were shot with my EOS60D.  They are photomergrned into panoramas with the help of CS5.  They click to embiggen.  If you want the full megapixel view check out my SGV & SGR set on flickr.

Lovin' the iPhone panorama feature

Click to embiggen and get the full picture.  Its pretty amazing, not the image but the tool to capture.

The iPhone panoramic feature is pretty awesome tool.  You simply select it from the options bar, and rotate smoothly, keeping the arrow on the line and you get a seamless panoramic image.  Just like this.  None of that sloppy image blending from photoshop, this is really a wonderful tool.  I use it often.

I've done a few others, but this is my favorite image so far.  Love the desert sunsets.  Loved better how the iPhone program seamlessly addressed the changing exposure from where the sun was setting to the already darkening horizon.  Yummy.

Few more panoramic images from Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree National Park is a magical place, but then again I feel that way about most of the desert.  It takes special critters and plants to survive out there.  And each is so uniquely adapted to the harsh environment that they are so unlike what you find in the rest of the country.  Very cool stuff there Maynard.

In CS5 for reasons I don't understand you can't do even basic manipulations and corrections to a panoramic image.  You need to save it as a jpeg then do your image corrections.  In this case as I shot late morning and colors were starting to desaturate and such I needed to do some color correction and tone correction in order for them to pop a bit better.  From the PSD image I saved as a JPEG then did my corrections then resized for this blog...yup they have size limitations.  You can click to get bigger images to get a bigger sense of space of Joshua Tree.  The place is quite spectacular and not devoid of life at all...contrary to one one would think of a desert.

Can't wait to get there for the wild flowers while they are in bloom next spring!

Coming out of a post-migraine hangover

And its a doozie of a migraine hangover, will spare you all the gorie details but the last 6 months I have been battling non-stop chronic migraines that with the help of a talented neurologist over at Kaiser I finally have a handle on controlling them.  Needless to say the near constant headaches put a crimp in the creativity. To celebrate I took a little day hike out into the desert.  Specifically we hiked around Joshua Tree National Park not far from where my daughter and son-in-law live in Twentynine Palms, CA.

Each of these panoramic images were post processed with the help of Adobe's CS5...no I'm not getting CS6 any time soon as 5 works just fine for me.

I'll post more images in the next few days of the area.  Can't wait to get back out there to shoot more.  Would love to shoot the wild flowers when the are in bloom in the spring.  It would be really nice to watch a sunrise or sunset among the red/orange rocks as well.

Just to brush off this blog a bit...

Wow, its been busy around here since the LA Auto Show...keeping up with it all has been a challenge.

This weeks adventures took me to Detroit for the North American International Auto Show. What a show it was.  This was all courtesy of Acura who sees the value in bloggers and like what I do here and at So Cal Auto Blog. 

The panoramas here were done with the help of Adobe's CS5.  This program does a pretty admirable job of blending multiple images into one giant shot. It isn't perfect and for reasons I don't understand it will blend some like these examples then completely is thrown off with others that it can't blend.  Anyone have an idea why it is so inconsistent with the combining of series shot  into panoramas and not with others?

A little travel R&R

This last week was spent in the Palm Springs Area. We love going out there to just hang in the pool and enjoy the desert heat. Yes, August can be beastly but all is right with the world as long as you have a pool to cool off in.

On our radar for a while has been the Palm Springs Air Museum on the airport property. This year we finally made it too there and wish we had done so much earlier. What a great place to spend an afternoon. It is two huge hangar just stuffed with old airplanes from WWII along with a ton of dioramas giving you a terrific snapshot of that era. The docents wound up being extremely engaging and probably the best I have ever seen for bringing history to life...some of them are actually old enough to have served in the war and have their stories to share.

This image was shot with an ultra wide angle lens and stitched together with Adobe's CS5. The photomerge tool there does an amazing job of combining images into one panorama. If you haven't played with it you should.

The Palm Springs Air Museum is located at 745 Gene Autry Trail in Palm Springs. Their web site has a ton more details as to when they are open and any special exhibits going on.

There are quite a few images also in my Palm Springs Air Museum set on flickr HERE.

Panoramic images in CS5

Woot its a party at the PC with CS5's multiple options for blending images for panoramas from several shots. You need to play around with them to get to understand how they take images and blend them together. What you need to know is I used "Spherical" as the option and used 3 basic jpeg files to get to the desired image with minimal distortion.

The actual file is HUGE...so I re-sized and dumbed it down to fit into a blog post. Suffice it to say its still a very large image that gives you a sense of the depth and views from atop Tom Sauk Mountain in MO looking over the St Francios Mountain Range that is with the northern Ozarks and is the highest point in all of MO.

Click away for a larger version for your viewing pleasure. I sure do pick nice places to explore over vacations.

Next is the wine growing regions of Santa Barbara County.