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.

I stopped to take a picture of the Lake, but then noticed the aspen-festooned scene across the road from the Lake. I took two frames to make a stitched panorama of the back-lit aspens. The cream-colored bark and fine network of branches makes them a good subject.

Shooting into the sun poses problems. I used my hand to block stray light. With an SLR (Nikon D80, zoom at 18mm) it is theoretically possible to see when one’s hand is in the picture, but I messed up a bit in the second frame (B). The road is too bright (A) and is distracting (C). The composition is good, even after the errant finger is cropped out. The sky balances the road, and the mountains set the location.

Unfortunately a straight flat-perspective panorama doesn’t splice correctly.

It looks okay at a glance, but close-up it’s apparent the splice is not smooth. The fix is to use a cylindrical projection in the Photoshop™ photomerge™ panorama. That fixes the splice, but the resulting image straight out of Photoshop is more fan-shaped. After the fan is cropped to rectangular, the upper parts of the mountains and the sky are lost. Actually, the upper right corner of the rectangle was missing, but I cheated and used Photoshop to paint in blue sky. That enabled cropping higher on the mountains.

In Photoshop, lowering the brightness with the built-in control leaves the brightest white unchanged while lowering the less bright tones. For jobs like fixing A and C it’s better to darken the brightest whites. That’s done by selecting the region with the magic wand, then filling it with black at 10% opacity. I also cropped out most of the nearby road.

A large version of the photo is here.

What I should have done is to position the camera vertically and taken three frames to cover the scene. Then I would have had more mountain and sky to play with. As it is, it may be that the conventional single frame photo is better than the panorama.

Nah, panoramas are always better.