Herring Spawn-2912, a photo by Pacific Landscapes on Flickr.

This years’s herring spawn in San Francisco Bay set records for the numbers of herring coming in to drop their roe. For the past week, pelicans, cormorants, ducks, gulls, and other shorebirds have enjoyed a feeding frenzy of epic proportions. The herring have moved offshore, but their eggs are washing ashore providing a rich protein feed for birds that feed in the surf. These gulls were flocking at the beach in the village of San Quentin, in front of the prison.

Saturday morning January 14, 2012. Handheld with a Canon 5D Mkii with a 400 f/5.6 lens. 1/1250 of a second at f/7.1.

Shaman in the Moonlight – Photography stopped being a solitary act for me the first time Ann joined me on a photo adventure and she shared the first of many, many good ideas. When Marcus was born, I found new joys in expressing the musical notes he wove into our fabric. When we’re all together and sharing a good vibe, the photographic output is always richer for their input – intended or circumstantial.On a trip to Mt. Diablo Marcus got a sudden yen for rock climbing which took us to Rock City. As he ran from one formation to another, he led us under an oak tree that framed the rising moon through a twisting core. Maybe it’s because I just started reading Carlos Casteneda that I got distracted by a shape that reminded me of cliff carvings of a dancing shaman – with the moon over his right shoulder.

Mt. Diablo State Park, Danville, California January 7, 2012.

Exposure was 1/400th at f/5.6 at ISO 400 with a Canon 400mm f/5.6 lens. Processed in Adobe Lightroom.

Joshua Tree NP-2010, a photo by Pacific Landscapes on Flickr.

Joshua Tree National Park features a small but accessible natural arch along an easy trail at the White Tank Campground. Not featured on the standard park map, this gem is a quarter mile walk from the drive-in campground, and is a fun family hike that provides bouldering and exploring opportunities for the whole family. Five year-old Marcus is seen here in between the rocks of the arch on Christmas Eve morning, 2011.

Via Flickr:
Part of a collection of images from a 20-hour visit to Joshua Tree National Park. December 24, 2011.

Intrigued by Microsoft’s Photosynth, but turned off to realize it requires viewers to have Silverlight installed, I looked around for another highly-rated iPhone app for panoramas and found Dermandar. Dermandar seamlessly overlaps vertical images from an iPhone into a partial or 360 degree panorama. The resulting images can be viewed online, via email or embedded as an HTML5 video in your free account at Dermandar. It renders output in HTML5 or Flash and is a breeze to use. Image quality is excellent, and it’s easy to share to a free Dermandar account for further online distribution. Worth the $1.99 for the app right from the first use.

Dermandar is easy to embed in Wordpress using the Dermandar plugin. It took me just two minutes to install and activate the plugin and half a minute more to find the video ID to post into the proper tags to embed in this site.

Update: I’ve added a second panorama to this post from Disneyland as well.  Note the cool double-image of Marcus on the left-hand side from his movement into the second frame.

This is a sample panorama produced by Microsoft’s Photosynth iPhone application. The application helps photographers make seamless panoramas from their iPhone. The stitching program makes overlaps each new image by approximately 50%, making it easy to assemble a partial or 360 degree panorama. Even though this sample is a partial panorama, I highly recommend making 360 degree views as the viewing experience is much more emotionally involving that a flat photograph and conveys far more information.

My only experience with panoramas prior to Photosynth has been creating flat panoramas of 180 or 240 degrees. Photosynth enables quick, quality immersive 360 degree panorama experiences. It dramatically enhances the creative possibilities with a smartphone camera and gives photographers a new way to express their experience of a place. The Photosynth app makes it easy to scroll and view the resulting image on the phone, or upload it to Photosynth (with a Windows Live account) for online viewing as a scrollable panorama. You can also upload flat images to Facebook.

One last thought – the online collection of partial and 360 panoramas made by Photosynth users is pretty impressive, and a great way to remotely explore travel locations. The panoramas are searchable on Bing Maps. I love the Four Corners region and found some interesting panoramas of Canyon de Chelly simply by drilling into the map. Here’s an example of a good one I found by a user known as mike.lyoung. Mike has 9 Southwestern Photosynths on his page, and they’re all quite good. Worth exploring on Photosynth to find your own favorites.

San Francisco-style Lunar Eclipse – San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge framing the pre-dawn lunar eclipse seen from a roof in the Marina District looking westward to Marin County and the Pacific. © Stephen Lefkovits 2011 – pacific-landscapes.com

Westward Orientation, a photo by Pacific Landscapes on Flickr.

Thanksgiving Day sunset looking through the Golden Gate Bridge from Berkeley’s Cesar Chavez Park. November 24, 2011. Made just after holiday dinner and before the tiramisu for dessert.

The highly variable weather in the Golden Gate makes the winter months a fantastic time to make images of San Francisco Bay and the bridges with dramatic clouds near and far. Cesar Chavez Park provides gret views of the GG Bridge, as well as the possibility of having soaring seagulls fly into a scenic frame at any time. At this time of year, the sun setting behind the bridge can be seen from the next town over from behind the Albany Racetrack which has a large, convenient area of accessible shoreline you can access from 80 from Buchanan St or on a bike from the Gilman exit.

This image is a high dynamic-range composite of three consecutive frames made using varied exposures (-2, 0, +2). Image was processed in Photomatix 4 and Lightroom.

Milky Way and Andromeda Over El Capitan – The autumn Milky Way shining over Yosemite’s El Capitan on a moonless evening, October 2011. At the same time, climbers on the face of El Capitan shine their own light back at the universe in this 27 second fish-eye exposure.

Galiano Eagle-9222 – Galiano Island, British Columbia July 5, 2009. A bald eagle searching the channel for food on a quiet day. Although daylight, the background tree appears as ephemera or a suggestion of a staged backdrop rather than a substantive object. Seen by boat on the water’s edge.

This morning I knocked down this spider’s web that hangs in the upper corner of our garage door. Went for a bike ride and came back to find that she’d spun the entire web again. Here she is spinning some additional silk, seen from the underside.