Last week it was problems with uncooperative seagulls. This week a different problem, and with a flighty hawk. At our local Coyote Hills Regional Park I saw the hawk perched in a distant walnut tree and zoomed the lens on my pocket camera (a Nikon P7000) in time to get a picture of him taking flight. After taking the picture I realized I had zoomed too much and just gotten the tree top. A misty landscape is not to be overlooked, so I took a second image to splice into a an odd-sort of panorama — there are not too many panoramas taken with a telephoto. The splicing turned out to present challenges.

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.

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.

The specific problem with the edge of the bluff at Point Lobos was getting it in focus, but let’s step back from the edge for a moment. Point Lobos State Reserve is on the California coast about two hours drive south of San Francisco. Point Lobos deserves its proclamation as “the greatest meeting of land and water in the world.” It eases the burden on photographers in one sense, because almost no matter where one points the camera one is likely to get a remarkable picture. However, it raises the bar in terms of measuring up to the splendor presented.

Many digital cameras come with free software for organizing and editing your photographs. That software is fine for casual users, but if you are a photo hobbyist advanced enough to, say, read a photo blog, then it’s best to invest in Adobe Photoshop Elements™. Elements was upgraded from version 6.0 to 7.0 last year, so you know it is a mature product. It comprises an organizer for filing and retrieving images and a photo editor for improving them. The basics are well-covered at this point, but I have some suggestions for improvements. These range from searching caption text to improved methods of resizing images, tagging, and making panoramas.

The grand landscapes of Ansel Adams generally do not include tourists in the foreground gawking at the spectacle along with Ansel. That 8” x 10” film was pricey so he had to be rather picky about subject matter. A click away with a digital camera, so we can afford to experiment. Including human subjects lends scale to the scenes, gives cues to the era, and tells more about what it was like to have been at the place. Moreover, tourists are preoccupied so they tend not to care if they happen to be in your pictures.

Multilevel indoor shopping malls provide good subject matter for spliced panoramas that use four images in a 2 × 2 array. Activities on the levels provide a doll house effect, with many small “rooms” in the scene to view. I took this panorama at the Newpark Mall in Newark, California recently:

The Photomerge™ option in Adobe Photoshop Elements serves to stitch multiple images together into one. It usually works remarkably well, but sometimes it just doesn’t do the job. In those cases, the problem can often be solved by perspectively correcting the individual images before merging them.